An intimate account of the genesis of the _Collingwood_ design is given us by the biographer of Sir Cooper Key, to illustrate the manner in which that prescient administrator succeeded in forecasting the trend of future construction. In ’66, he says, Captain Key had put on paper a résumé of his ideas on warship design which was clearly several years in advance of current opinion. Briefly, he had maintained that the specifications for our first-class battleships of the future should be drawn to cover the following features so far as possible:--moderate speed, small length and great handiness; perfect protection for vital parts and a complete water-line belt, rather than protection for personnel and above-water structure; a main-deck armament of broadside guns of medium calibre amidships, and of lighter calibre towards the ends, in combination with an upper-deck armament of four large guns in two unarmoured barbettes, one mounted before the foremast and one abaft the mizzen-mast; no sails. But for some years no approach was made to this ideal ship of Captain Key’s; the ideas it embodied were antagonistic to those held by the great majority of his brother officers. “In 1878 there had been laid down by the French, at Toulon, a ship called the _Caiman_. She was 278 feet long, and had a speed of 14½ knots. She carried a single 42-cm. breech-loading rifled gun at the bow, and another at the stern, each mounted _en barbette_, and she further carried on each broadside, between the barbettes, two 10-cm. guns, besides machine-guns. She was heavily armoured by a water-line belt 19½ inches thick amidships, and tapering in thickness towards bow and stern. The middle part of the ship, between the barbettes, was further protected by a steel deck 2·8 inches thick. Evidently, there was in this ship some approach to that general ideal which had been in Sir Cooper Key’s mind in 1866--not, however, more than this. She gave a sort of hint to the constructors at the Admiralty, and, before Sir Cooper Key joined the Board, a new design, based indeed on the _Caiman’s_ hint, but yet differing widely from her, and, by as much as she differed, approaching more nearly to Sir Cooper Key’s ideal, was in process of completion there. The ship was the _Collingwood_.”