The author desires once more to disclaim the writing of a military text-book. Apart from the peculiar qualifications requisite for such work, it is doubtful whether history can be written on lines suitable for a treatise of the kind. History is a consecutive narrative of facts accompanied by suitable comment; a text-book should enunciate certain principles and select historical facts as illustrations. So far as history, pure and simple, is valuable to the military student, and it has always been pronounced by great leaders and critics to be the most fruitful of studies, — so far will these volumes reach. But they aim rather, for the benefit of the general reader, to enlarge upon those military facts to which the histories devote small Space, and thus narrate the origin and growth of the art of war, than to spread before the young military student those principles which lie at the basis of the profession he proposes to embrace.