But still naval architecture, considered either as an art or as a science, was stagnant. As a class the Surveyors were men of very restricted education--“there is scarcely a name on the list of any eminence as a designer or a writer.” Those who ordered ships at the Board were “busy politicians, or amateurs without a knowledge of science, or sailors too impatient of innovation to regard improvements.” In no other profession, perhaps, were theory and practice so out of sympathy with each other. The native art of the builder was numbed and shackled, by the restrictions imposed upon him as to tonnage and dimensions; the study of ship form, with a view to analysing the forces under which sailing ships moved by wind through water and to discovering the laws which those forces obeyed, was still mainly an academic pastime of the Society for Improving Naval Architecture, and outside the province of the naval authorities. Our ships were still formed on no rational principle. Captured French ships served as models to be copied. Often our builders would make fanciful variations from the originals--a little more sheer, a little more beam, etc. etc.--and as often they spoiled their copies. Whenever they followed closely the forms and features of the originals they succeeded in producing vessels which were pronounced to be among the best ships in the navy. With this state of affairs, it is no matter for surprise that much of the new construction of the period was of small value. “Sir Joseph Yorke produced a set of corvettes, longer and narrower than brigs, none of which answered; and they were sold out of the service. Then came the ‘Forty Thieves,’ a small class of 74’s; but in justice to the designer, Sir H. Peake (who copied them from a French ship), it must be added that his lines were altered by the Navy Board, and the vessels were contract-built. Lord Melville built half a dozen ‘fir frigates,’ which neither sailed nor stood under canvas. The 22-gun and 28-gun donkey frigates ‘could neither fight nor run away’; it was dangerous to be on board them; and the bad sailing of such vessels was the chief cause of our ill success in the American War. The old 10-gun brigs, or ‘floating coffins,’ as they were significantly styled, were equally dangerous and unsightly. They had no room to fight their guns; no air between decks, which were only five feet high; extra provisions and stores were piled above hatches; and the fastest of them sailed no more than eight or nine knots.”[33]