and to love God, and have always before the eyes the fear of offending Him, more than the fear of all other men of war whatsoever. For, whensoever they fire a bombard, cannon, or any other piece of artillery, or that they desire to make use of gunpowder, their great strength and force constantly cause the cannon which they fire to burst; and, if the cannon itself do not burst, there always is a risk of being burned by the powder, if he is not very cautious, and does not use a good discretion for his own preservation and safety; of the which powder the vapour alone is really venomous against man, as presently we shall show; and it is to him an enemy more grievous and terrible than to all others, through its desire to kill and to destroy him by means of the great ills and mischiefs and damages that it does to him in its said vocation and trade." Le livre du secret de l'art de l'artillerie et canonnerie, p. 139.

The manner in which the earliest cannon were mounted made it a matter of the greatest difficulty to alter the direction in which even the small pieces were laid, while in the case of the greater cannon every alteration of the kind was altogether out of the question; and this alone was constantly enough to render the artillery useless. The early gunners were quick enough, indeed, in discovering means for raising and depressing their pieces, so as to change and regulate their elevation; but it was reserved for the 15th century to witness the introduction of any contrivances for altering the direction in which cannon might be pointed, and for varying their horizontal

range.

It will be worth our while to glance at the machinery that was introduced in the 14th century for altering the elevation of cannon. The gun is laid upon two pieces of timber, resting one upon the other, of which the lower is fixed, and the upper (to which the gun is attached) is fastened at the end by a large bolt to the under, and on this bolt it can move as on

a hinge. At the other extremity it is free. Thus this upper piece of timber may be raised, and with it the gun may be raised in such a manner as to have its angle of firing changed. Curved pieces of wood then are placed on each side, wherein there are holes to enable the gunners to maintain the desired elevation; and in order for them to accomplish this, it is only necessary for them to pass a bolt of sufficient strength through the holes from one curved piece of timber to the other. The cannon, bearing on the bolt, would remain elevated towards the breech and depressed towards the muzzle at the desired degree of inclination. One caution only was necessary—and that was truly all-important—the gun, when thus elevated or depressed, must not receive a full charge, lest the recoil should destroy the whole apparatus.

In

At the present time, cannon move with ease on the field of battle; they are transported with the utmost rapidity from one point to another; and they may be pointed in any direction and at every elevation, with equal facility and security; and, in fact, the great part which this weapon now plays in warfare depends even more on this faculty of swift and easy movement than on any other condition. It is certain that Gustavus Adolphus, who was the first to adopt this system on an important scale, by this great innovation alone accomplished almost a complete revolution in the art of war. the 14th century, merely to bring up the cannon to the theatre of war was an operation sufficiently serious and difficult, and more particularly if one of the great bombards had to be dealt with. The gun itself had to be placed, for transport, on a vehicle constructed for that especial purpose. Then the guncarriage had to be placed, in its turn, upon another vehicle, that had been provided to suit its particular requirements. And when all this had been done-and done not without severe labour and great trouble-the chances were that the whole might stick fast in the road, and remain immovable even in

the face of the enemy; or, if this risk should happily prove to have been unfounded, when on the scene of action the gun would have to be removed, and the gun-carriage unloaded, and the gun would have to be mounted in order to be fit for service; and this by no means easy operation would have to be accomplished by means of yet another heavy and cumbersome machine, called a chèvre (a goat), formed of a timber framework, with ropes, and pulleys, and levers. After all these things had at last been effected, we can easily imagine that the gunners would not readily be disposed to entertain the idea of moving and altering the position of a bombard in face of the enemy. In action, accordingly, the cannon, after it had reached its destined position, was almost inoffensive (except, perhaps, to the gunners), since, when once the range of its fire had been ascertained by the enemy, it was a simple affair for them to avoid it. In sieges, of course, one of these old bombards, when fixed in its position, was more efficacious; and so, as a general rule, the early use of artillery, and especially of what may be distinguished as heavy artillery, soon became almost exclusively restricted to siege operations.

The first really important modifications, the first genuine improvements, effected in the closing years of the 14th century, took place in the projectiles. The stone balls that were used

in sieges were hooped with iron; and they were found at once to be more effective against walls than the simple balls of stone. But to form cannon-balls by the process of casting them, was not then to be thought of it was still held to be simply an impossibility. This operation, which now appears so simple, was altogether beyond the powers of the workers in metal who flourished in those days. On the other hand, as if to show that their genius and their abilities were by no means to be despised, those same artillerists invented firing with case-shot and firing with heated shot; and they made experiments with parabolic shot, or bombs, and they even

attempted to introduce hollow shells, that would burst after they had been fired from the guns.

These experiments and attempts were not all attended with the same success. The case-shot, that were formed of pieces of iron or stone bound together by a kind of cement which broke up in the act of the discharge, and the inflammable balls, which were stone kernels surrounded by combustible compositions, very nearly fulfilled the purposes that they were desired to fulfil, so that so far the enterprising inventors had tolerable reason to be satisfied; but the red-hot stone balls, that they wanted to use as we now use red-hot shot, in causing the cannon to explode too soon, were found to be so excessively dangerous to the gunners who had to discharge them, that they were laid aside as impracticable; and the same fate attended the hollow projectiles, which either would burst in the gunners' hands, or would not burst at all.

Meanwhile, an important innovation was introduced into the construction of the cannon. Bronze cannon were cast. These were found to be decidedly stronger than the guns that were made on the old system, as was proved by their enduring the shock of stronger charges and heavier projectiles. Still, comparatively strong as these bronze cannon unquestionably were, there always existed some degree of apprehension lest they should burst. This arose in a great measure from the discovery of the true proportions of the copper and tin not having then been made; nor was it known how to conduct such experiments as would lead to the discovery of this proportion. In this matter, as in many others, they worked, if not actually in the dark, certainly in a dim twilight, and sometimes the result was truly disastrous. The cast bronze guns, however, gradually grew into greater favour, and the wroughtiron guns in proportion were held in lighter esteem; and yet, some of the latter are found to have been in use even to a very late period.

Next, the gunpowder had its turn. The art of purifying the saltpetre at length was acquired; and thus it became possible to charge stronger guns with more active powder, and the consequence was that the projectiles generally acquired an increased velocity and a greater power.

Towards the middle of the century, improvements were introduced into the machine that was used for carrying the cannon; or, in other words, the cannon were then for the first time mounted on what may fairly be called gun-carriages. It would be at once tedious and unnecessary to attempt to describe the various forms that the carriages assumed in different countries, or as they passed through all their successive modifications and improvements; it is sufficient, indeed, to state that in every instance, from the time of its first adoption, the gun-carriage was provided with wheels, so that horses could be attached directly to the cannon itself, without the necessity for any independent means for transport. In the monuments of the period some gun-carriages may be seen which resemble small cars, in which the gun forms an integral part of the machine-such is the case with the early Swiss artillery. Others of these early carriages, again, have trails (flasques), after the manner of modern gun-carriages—they have, that is, the two lateral pieces which issue from the flanks of the cannon, and descend in its rear to the ground, and are curved with a greater or a lesser curvature.

About the same time was invented a means for elevating or depressing the gun, which would have somewhat the effect of a modern "sight; or, at any rate, in order to accomplish this, wedges of wood were placed, like so many pads, beneath the breech of the gun, in a greater or a lesser number, as it might be desired to depress the muzzle more or less. A more ingenious machine, but also one that was more complicated, was added, in order to obtain that important object which has already been noticed-changes in the horizontal range of