Our commission did its best.  It made a modest beginning by altering the fighting armament of our existing ships, placing their guns fore and aft, so as to permit of their developing their artillery power to the utmost possible extent, while at the same time exposing the propelling machinery to as little danger as possible.  We turned out ships of various types, such as the Descartes, the Cuvier, the Pluton, &c.  Then came the turn of the fabric of the ships themselves, and we had a series of experiments made on the practising ground at Gavres, near Lorient, to test the penetration of projectiles on every sort of substance—­wood, coal, gutta-percha, iron plates, and finally on iron plates superimposed one on the other—­in other words armour-plating.  It was ten years before the armour plating was actually brought into use, so great was the delay caused by political agitation in the country.

At Lorient, too, M. Labrousse, a post-captain in the navy, made experiments to find out the best form to give to the rams of warships, while a literary man, M. Jal by name, was hunting all the old books and archives for everything touching the manoeuvres and tactics of ancient rowing ships and galleys.

Then from paddle-ships we passed on to those with propellers which were submerged, and therefore much more easy to protect, and I went to watch the first trials of the newly-invented improvements at sea—­that of our first screw-ship, the Napoleon, a name which was afterwards exchanged for that of Corse, under which she served as a despatch-boat for over forty years—­of our first ironclad, a screw-ship, too, the Chaptal, built at Asnieres by M. Cave—­and of the Pomone, the first frigate we built with auxiliary engines, which was fitted with a screw-propeller designed by a Swedish engineer, Mr. Erickson.  But the most interesting of all these trials was that of the Napoleon, first, because, as I have already stated, she was our first screwship, and also because that particular mode of propulsion is of French invention.

An organ-builder at Amiens, of the name of Dallery, was the first person to think (in 1803) of building a boat driven by a screw.  He ruined himself over it, and broke up all his machinery in his despair.  The idea was taken up again later by M. Sauvage, a shipbuilder, who made some progress with it.  I had known Sauvage, in 1835, in connection with another invention called a physionotype, by means of which a mathematically correct impression could be taken of the features of any face.  But as everybody made an appalling grimace before putting their face into the instrument, the result, though strictly exact, was monstrously ugly.