] ]Both the Army and the Navy trained their staff in such sciences as were deemed valuable in their trade. Naval training was on average about thirteen years (starting when a boy was thirteen or so).

] Not exactly.

] In the Navy one received training in seamanship and the mathematics required for navigation, but that was it. There were real counterparts to the fictional Hornblower and Aubery who took intellectual pleasure in mathematics, but the Navy was otherwise a narrow and specialized profession.

] The only Army officers who received any kind of intellectual training in this era were the engineers and gunners who went to Woolwich. Infantry and cavalry officers were simply young men of good families who had bought their commissions. They were expected to be brave, not bright, and the only training they received was what they picked up on the job from their brother officers. Wellington's correspondence is full of his complaints about the stupidity both of junior officers and of many of the generals assigned to his command.

yes indeed. I recently read a Chalrotte Yonge book in which one of the characters said htat he was glad to get out of hte peactime army (this was set in Victorian times admittedly) becasue there was nothing to do but drill and he found it intellectually stifling.

and WRT the Navy, I beleive that it was considered rather infra dig to be too smart about mathematics and the like - Captain Bligh was a navigator and was considered rahter lower class than the other officers because his skills were in hte more mundane and practical