It is, perhaps, not generally remembered till what a very late date armies and navies were more than decimated by disease.  In 1810 the House of Commons affirmed by a resolution, concerning the Walcheren Expedition:  ’That on the 19th of August a malignant disorder showed itself amongst H.M. troops; and that on the 8th of September the number of sick amounted to upwards of 10,948 men.  That of the army which embarked for service in the Scheldt sixty officers and 3900 men, exclusive of those killed by the enemy, had died before the 1st of February last.’

In a volume of ’Military, Medical, and Surgical Essays’[73] prepared for the United States’ Sanitary Commission, and edited by Dr. Wm. A. Hammond, Surgeon-General of the U.S.  Army, it is stated that, in our Peninsular army, averaging a strength of 64,227 officers and men, the annual rate of mortality from the 25th of December 1810 to the 25th of May 1813 was 10 per cent. of the officers and 16 per cent. of the men.  We may calculate from this that some 25,000 officers and men died.  There were 22-1/2 per cent., or over 14,000, ‘constantly sick.’  Out of 309,268 French soldiers sent to the Crimea in 1855-6, the number of killed and those who died of wounds was 7500, the number who died of disease was 61,700.  At the same date navies also suffered.  Dr. Stilon Mends, in his life of his father,[74] Admiral Sir William Mends, prints a letter in which the Admiral, speaking of the cholera in the fleets at Varna, says:  ’The mortality on board the Montebello, Villede_Paris_, Valmy (French ships), and Britannia (British) has been terrible; the first lost 152 in three days, the second 120 in three days, the third 80 in ten days, but the last lost 50 in one night and 10 the subsequent day.’  Kinglake tells us that in the end the Britannia’s loss went up to 105.  With the above facts before us, we are compelled to adopt one of two alternatives.  We must either maintain that sanitary science made no advance between 1588 and 1855, or admit that the mortality in Elizabeth’s fleet became what it was owing to ignorance of sanitary laws and not to intentional bad management.  As regards care of the sick, it is to be remembered that the establishment of naval and military hospitals for the reception of sick soldiers and sailors is of recent date.  For instance, the two great English military hospitals, Netley and the Herbert, are only about sixty years old.

[Footnote 73:  Philadelphia, 1864.]

[Footnote 74:  London, 1899.]

So far from our fleet in 1588 having been ill-supplied with ammunition, it was in reality astonishingly well equipped, considering the age.  We learn from Mr. Julian Corbett,[75] that ’during the few years immediately preceding the outbreak of the war, the Queen’s navy had been entirely re-armed with brass guns, and in the process of re-armament a great advance in simplicity had been secured.’  Froude, without seeing where the admission would land