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 I Razc'Scv! : Tiocnty Favioiis Naval Battles 119- tonic peoples with navies of the same type. England after varying fortunes emerges victorious from this ordeal only to find herself once again pitted against a Latin and Romanist navy. Trafalgar is of course the culmination of this period, the first victory of England over the combined fleets of the two Latin empires which had disputed with her one after the other the supremacy of the sea and whose navies were now, strangely enough, united in the supreme effort against her. Trafal- gar was furthermore the culmination of the second era of the naval art, the culmination though not the end. As after the Spaniards the Dutch, so, in a smaller way, after the French, a Teutonic race still more closely related to the British than the Hollanders sent out their ships under a flag that John Paul Jones had already made famous on the sea, to seek and fight the ships'of England. Not that we should forget, and Professor Rawson neither forgets nor permits his readers to forget, the historical perspective. Our battles of 181 2 are placed among the twenty with Le- panto and Trafalgar, but there is no attempt to exaggerate their intrinsic importance. It is not only in the case of America that the author in- cludes fights that are not fleet actions. Indeed it is an avowed object of his to relate doughty deeds upon the sea, whether done by Greek or Ro- man, by English or Spaniard, by Dutch, Frenchman or his own Amer- icans. One of the great lessons of the book is the comparative useless- ness of fine ships and splendid abilities without conspicuous physical and intellectual pluck. After describing Perry's achievement on Lake Erie, the author ushers in the third and last era of naval warfare, that of steam. He describes the memorable fight between Monitor and Merrimac, where, as he sug- gests, two types of ironclads prophesied to the world what the ingenious foes might accomplish when reunited under the olden flag. The duel between the Kearsargs and Alabama and Farragut's brilliant achieve- ment in Mobile Bay complete the actions chosen from our Civil War. The scene now shifts to the Adriatic and we see the Italians in their fine fleet succumbing to the Austrians, another victory, it is perhaps fair to say, of Teuton over Latin. In Tegetthoff the author is as ready to see great qualities as in Perry or Farragut, and with similar impartiality his ne.xt chapter celebrates the valor of Chilians and Peruvians. The last two chapters contain vivid accounts of Manila Bay and Santiago. The Twenty Famous Battles thus ranges over a period of twenty-four centuries. Professor Rawson does not claim to offer considerable addi- tions to the historian's knowledge. He has written a most interesting book, but a book that is intended for a wide class of readers and not, except possibly in the American chapters, for the special student of any period of naval history. He aims simply to tell the story of these sea- fights accurately and vividly, but chiefly from sources generally known, and to impress upon the reader certain fundamental and eternal laws of strategy and tactics, holding up constantly before him the qualities with- out which no sailor can deserve to win his battles. The author has the facilities of his position for examining governmental naval records, so