Old things have been displaced by new; and the magnitude of the results has been extraordinary.

The most important changes have been in the use of iron and steel instead of wood, and in the employment of the steam-engine in impelling ships by the paddle or the screw.
So long as timber was used for the construction of ships, the number of vessels built annually, especially in so small an island as Britain, must necessarily have continued very limited.

Indeed, so little had the cultivation of oak in Great Britain been attended to, that all the royal forests could not have supplied sufficient timber to build one line-of-battle ship annually; while for the mercantile marine, the world had to be ransacked for wood, often of a very inferior quality.
Take, for instance, the seventy-eight gun ship, the Hindostan, launched a few years ago.

It would have required 4200 loads of timber to build a ship of that description, and the growth of the timber would have occupied seventy acres of ground during eighty years.[2] It would have needed something like 800,000 acres of land on which to grow the timber for the ships annually built in this country for commercial purposes.
And timber ships are by no means lasting.

The average durability of ships of war employed in active service, has been calculated to be about thirteen years, even when built of British oak.
Indeed, years ago, the building of shipping in this country was much hindered by the want of materials.
The trade was being rapidly transferred to Canada and the United States.