Mr. Holland and I worked on entirely different lines in the development of our respective types of boats, he being a consistent advocate of the diving principle. He contended for many years that a submarine boat should be built small in size and with little statical stability, so as to dive quickly, while I have stood for great statical stability and for methods of submerging the vessel bodily on a level keel instead of diving at excessive and dangerous angles. I have never refused to accede to him the credit of having been the man who first made the diving type of submarine practical, and to acknowledge his genius and attention to detail which overcame the difficulties which caused the failure of many of his predecessors who attempted to build boats of the diving type. He died on August 12, 1914, just at the beginning of the present European war, and consequently did not live to see the fulfilment of his prophecy that the submarine would prove the superior of the battleship if they ever became opponents in actual warfare. My own experimental work began when I was a mere schoolboy. I had become interested in the submarine by reading Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea." Shortly afterward I took up the study of natural physics and became interested in the use of the diving bell. Being an excellent swimmer and fond of boats, I spent most of my vacation times on or about the water. I remember building a canvas canoe from a description published in _Golden Days_. This canoe was very "cranky," being only about eighteen inches wide and the sides eighteen inches high. The only way I could learn to sit in the canvas canoe was by ballasting her with pig iron and gradually reducing the ballast as I became more expert, until finally I learned how to keep an equilibrium and maintain the canoe upright. There was only one other boy I remember in the village of Toms River, where I lived at that time, who could ride this canoe, consequently some of the boat men, when they saw it one day drifting bottom side up down the river, came to the conclusion that I had been dumped out and drowned. When they came alongside and righted the canoe they were much surprised to find me in it. I had turned the canoe upside down and crawled up into it, the air pressure keeping the water from rising into it. I had crawled in there for the purpose of finding out how long I could live on the volume of air contained within the canoe; in the meantime it was drifting down the river.