Throughout the modern story of yachting the tonnage question has been the all-absorbing one. Looking back, through the pages of those sporting papers and periodicals which forty years ago devoted a meagre portion of their space to yachting, one is struck by the same feature that shows prominently in the 'Field' or 'Yachtsman' of to-day. For one letter on any other subject, there are a dozen on the measurement question, and the writers handled their pens in much the same energetic way then as now, in abuse of rival theorists; but, more merciful than the moderns, spared us their elaborate formulæ. These controversies happily have served the useful purpose of preserving for the historian of to-day a good many facts which might otherwise have been lost; for our dear old friend 'Hunt's Magazine,' in his flowery youth, is fonder of treating us to an 'Ode to the Yachtsman's Bride,' or a relation of 'How Miss Delany married an Officer,' than to facts regarding measurement, or time allowances, and these are only to be picked up incidentally as it were from the correspondence of the quarrelsome gentlemen aforesaid. It is to be hoped that the yachting historian of the twentieth century may reap a like benefit from our controversialists of to-day, and that those mathematicians who now brandish their tonnage formulæ to the terror of all quietly disposed yachtsmen will find a reader in the searcher after facts of 1950. Yachting, then, may be said to have begun with this century; for although, as is shown elsewhere in these volumes, yachts are mentioned long before that date, it was hardly until the century opened, or indeed until after the Crimean War, that yachting as a sport became fairly established in this country.