Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Here is no difficulty in the learned writing for the learned, but it is extremely difficult to com pose a work for the instruction of the ignorant. The more comprehensive and exact knowledge the writer has of his subject the more arduous is the effort to express his thoughts in such simplicity as will make it understandable to those who have little or no knowledge of the subject he treats. This is doubly so when the subject is one like sailing - an art whose language is wholly technical and almost totally divorced from the common expressions of life. It is impossible to trans late sea language into land language; nor is it possible to explain the conditions and Operations of the art with out employing sea terms.