Excerpt from The Story of the Submarine: From the Earliest Ages to the Present Day The Submarine Torpedo-boat is a new addition to the arma ments of the Naval Powers. But its evolution has been the work of centuries. Vague accounts of submersible vessels filter down to us from the Middle Ages, while there are plenty of accounts of divers who, with and without special appliances to enable them to remain under water, were employed in warfare hundreds of years before Christ and for many centuries afterwards. In the pages of the little volume now before the reader, the author has endeavoured to give an outline of the history of Submarine Warfare and Navigation from the Earliest Ages to the Present Day. He has studied to avoid technicalities and diagrams, which, valuable and useful as they are in more ambitious works, are, in his opinion, out of place in a book which is intended merely to satisfy the curiosity of the man in the street, and for the amusement of the casual reader, without aiming at being a work of reference. Finally, the author has to acknowledge the valuable assistance he has received in his compilation from the works of N. Pesce, Alan H. Burgoyne, and Maurice Belpeuch, which are each and all of them most comprehensive books of reference on Submarine Navigation. He is especially indebted to Mr. Burgoyne for his kind permission to make use of the numerous diagrams and drawings in his Submarine Navigation in the prepara tion of the illustrations. 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.