While Bentham was still building up his stock of fundamental principles, he was already beginning to think about some of their applications to particular situations. The first fruits of this style of thinking were some writings about religion, the little pamphlet entitled View of the Hard-Labour Bill (a commentary on a preliminary draft of what became the Penitentiary Act of 1779), a sketchy plan for a Board of Shipbuilding to stimulate inventions and experiments in naval architecture, and a similar plan for an Office of Intelligence to collect information about the merits, defects and operations of existing laws. The essays on religion displayed the awareness of the political significance of churches, liturgies and doctrines that was so prominent in Bentham's later writings on that subject. The three institutional schemes were not, in contemporary terms, very distinguished essays in institution building, but they served as pilot studies or exercises for the construction of the more complex institutions that Bentham later undertook, and in the meantime they led him to think carefully about some of the principles and devices of preventive police. He did not, however, persevere with these topics once he began serious work on the introduction to his code. And when, in 1782, he laid aside the manuscript of his incomplete masterpiece, he did not return to them but concentrated instead on the three essays that he saw as its natural sequel. They occupied him intermittently for much of the rest of the decade, and intensively in its middle years.