The idea that we borrowed originally from the Dutch is no longer tenable.

The Dutch themselves do not even claim the invention of the line.

Indeed in no foreign authority, either Dutch, French or Spanish, have I been able to discover a claim to the invention of any device in sailing tactics that had permanent value.

Even the famous tactical school which was established in France at the close of the Seven Years' War, and by which the French service so brilliantly profited in the War of American Independence, was worked on the old lines of Hoste's treatise.

Morogues' _Tactique Navale_ was its text-book, and his own teaching was but a scientific and intelligent elaboration of a system from which the British service under the impulse of Anson, Hawke, and Boscawen was already shaking itself free.
Much of the old learning which the volume contains is of course of little more than antiquarian interest, but the bulk of it in the opinion of those best able to judge should be found of living value.
All systems of tactics must rest ultimately on the dominant weapon in use, and throughout the sailing period the dominant weapon was, as now, the gun.