To speak of all the types of armour-clad ships would most undoubtedly weary the reader. Let us examine a leading example. The _Inflexible_ (double turret ship) is probably the greatest result yet attained. She is an ironclad of 11,400 tons, with 8,000 horse-power, her estimated first cost being considerably over half a million sterling. She is 320 feet long, and has armour of 16 to 24 inches thick, with a backing of 17 to 25 inches of wood. She has no less than 135 compartments, while her engines are so completely isolated that if one breaks down the other would be working. “But already, as if to show the impossibility of attaining the stage of finality as regards the construction of our men-of-war, there is every reason to believe that she has been excelled.... Designed,” says our leading journal,(45) “as an improvement upon the Russian _Peter the Great_, she will herself be surpassed by the two Italian frigates which are building at La Spezzia and Castellamare.... While the _Inflexible’s_ turrets are formed of a single thickness of 18-inch armour, and her armament consists of four 81-ton guns, the turrets of the _Dandolo_ and the _Duilio_ are built of plates 22 inches thick, and are armed with four 100-ton guns.” The writer then enlarges on recent gunnery experiments, showing that even the enormous thickness of the _Inflexible’s_ iron sides have been pierced, and concludes by saying that, “so far as the exigencies of the navy are concerned, the limit of weight seems to have already been reached, for the simple reason that the buoyancy of our ironclads cannot with safety be further diminished by the burden of heavier armour and armaments.” The leading feature in this vessel is the situation of the turrets. In most turret ships afloat these batteries are placed on the middle line, and in consequence only one-half the guns can be brought to bear on an enemy either right ahead or directly astern. In the _Inflexible_ the turrets rise up on either side of the ship _en échelon_ within the citadel walls, the fore turret being on the port side and the after turret on the starboard side. By these means the whole of the four guns can be discharged _simultaneously_ at a ship right ahead or right astern, or, in pairs, towards any point. What vessel could withstand such a fire rightly directed? [Illustration: THE “INFLEXIBLE.”]