Excerpt from British Battle Fleet, Vol. 1: Its Inception and Groeth Throughout the Centuries to the Present Day His book is not intended to be a history of the British Navy in the generally accepted sense of the term. For this reason small space is devoted to various strategical and tactical matters of the past which generally bulk largely in more regular naval histories - Oi which a sufficiency already exist. In such histories primary interest naturally attaches to what the admirals did with the ships provided for them. Here I have sought rather to deal with how the ships came to be provided, and how they were developed from the crude warships Of the past to the intricate and compli cated machines of to-day; and the strictly history part of the book is compressed with that idea principally in View. The live end of naval construction is necessarily that which directly or indirectly concerns the ships of our own time. The warships of the past are of special interest in so far as they were steps to the warships of to-day but, outside that, practical interest seems confined to what led to these steps being what they were. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.