In a lecture on 'Progress in Yachting and Yacht-building,' which I delivered early in 1881, in a fanciful specification of the yacht for the season 2000, I required that the plating below water should be of manganese bronze. Curiously enough, a few years later saw an attempt to combine the strength of steel and the smoothness, anti-fouling, and non-corrosive properties of copper, in the building of a torpedo-boat of this material; while this year the chosen defender of the America Cup has been plated with a similar bronze on a steel frame, the builders claiming, and not without reason, that the additional smoothness of bottom gives her an advantage of five to seven minutes on a forty-mile course. But such a practice seems hardly likely to become general for ordinary racing yachts built for men with a normal depth of pocket, and whilst, as in the old Mississippi steamboat days, it sometimes paid to burn hams, most of us have to try and get along with good coal. I was going to build the topsides, frames, and beams of my ideal vessel of aluminium, and the other day a small yacht has been built, on the Continent, of this lightest of metals; but the present cost of this material, and, as yet, its unreliability, place it, for the present at least, outside the range of practical material for yacht-building. There seems more hope for some of the very beautiful and immensely strong alloys of aluminium, but they too are expensive, and also heavy. It may be some years before the complete realisation of my design is accomplished, and platinum is substituted for lead as ballast, though when syndicates of millionaires start yacht-building there seems very little limit to extravagance in construction. In nickel-steel there is promise of a very perfect material. This is an alloy of the ordinary Siemens-Martin steel with nickel, and called by the makers Yolla metal. It can be made to comply with all the ordinary tests applied to ship steel, in the way of ductility under stress, and at the same time have a breaking strength of 40 tons to the square inch as against 27 for ordinary steel. This metal was used by Mr. Fife in 1893 for the frames and beams of the 20-rater 'Dragon' (third), and although the few pounds of weight saved by no means accounted for the phenomenal success of this little ship, yet the gain was all in the right direction. Wire standing rigging continued to improve in quality, and very rapidly pushed out the old hemp rigging. From being made at first of good charcoal iron wire, it is now manufactured of the very highest class of steel, of such perfect character that the breaking strength of each wire is equal to 130 tons per square inch. Used at first for standing rigging only, flexible wire rope takes the place of Manilla or hemp for the runners, and runner tackles, topping lifts, bobstay falls, outhauls, topsail and jib-topsail halliards, and latterly even for throat and peak halliards.