wrote the designer of the new type, “more than make amends for the moderate addition to the steam power.”[164] Here we may briefly note the conversion of the timber-built fleet. In ’57 Captain Moorsom had submitted a scheme of cutting down ships to a short height above the water-line and using the weight thus gained to provide an armour belt. Sir Charles Napier had advocated a similar policy in parliament. As soon as the necessity for armour was accepted this policy was adopted; not only were the resources of the private ship-yards bent to the building of a fleet of new iron warships, but the best of the old navy was metamorphized in the royal dockyards by the process of the _razee_: the cutting down of two-deckers and their conversion into iron-belted frigates. By these exertions France was soon outstripped in the struggle. For a long time she clung to wooden ships, though in ’62 she adopted iron for upper works; and of such ships, of wooden bottoms but of iron above the water-line, she built a fleet “possessing only one possible merit--uniformity; which the new English construction lacked.” The combination of heavy steam machinery and wooden hulls was the cause of continuous difficulties; the growth of artillery rendered the ships obsolete almost before they were built. § By the time the _Warrior_ and her sister ships were afloat the great struggle between armour and artillery was well in progress. It was a struggle which was to lead to unsuspected developments in naval architecture. For the moment, and in the presence of the new iron-built ironclads, the gun was at its lowest point of effectiveness. But rifling had conferred new powers on it, and the greatest efforts were being put forth to improve its position. As it grew rapidly in size and power, naval experts were faced with a succession of problems of extraordinary difficulty. Two things were in question: both the type and the disposition of gun best suited for a warship’s armament.