the carrying of soldiers at sea for definite destructive purposes. The lessons of the past could teach them what dangers crash tactics might imply, and enable them to think out replies. It is probable that all this was considered. But they did not carry their researches into the future as well as the past.
Had they done so, they would not necessarily have divined the advent of the corvi. They might have to a certain extent, because the corvi, like everything else, were an evolution and part of a cycle reverting to past methods—they might have anticipated or they might not have. But the mental exercise of speculating as to whether at some future date their present methods would be equally efficacious, whether such principles as then obtained were eternal faced with imaginary but logical conditions of the future, would undoubtedly have rendered them fitter to meet the terrible surprise of the corvi when it came, and fitter to evolve an answer to it. Hence the wisdom of testing every eternal principle by the future as well as by the past.
By the corvi the Romans extended the striking radius of their soldiers at sea—they extended it from their own decks to the decks of the enemy.
It is an eternal principle founded on the past that progress is always on the lines of extended radius of ship or weapon. For geographical reasons it can no longer be counterbalanced strategically by extending the ship area; but we have seen it counterbalanced
