24 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



kinds. There were more then 800 gun-carriages, and nearly as many am- 

 munition Avagons and vehicles of other kinds pertaining to artillery opera- 

 tions. All this was for the siege-works alone ; the lighter artillery for field- 

 service presented a further store of guns, carriages, and vehicles, making the 

 vast total of about 1,700 pieces of cannon, and 4,800 wheel-vehicles required 

 for their service, sent from France during the war. As may be readily sup- 

 posed, the missiles to be vomited forth by these instruments of destruction 

 were numbered by millions rather than by thousands, Their array was 

 fearfully vast : 2,000,000 of cannon balls, shells and similar projectiles ; 

 10,000,000 pounds of gunpowder, in barrels ; and 66,000,000 ball-cartridges 

 for muskets and rifles. If Sebastopol had not fallen when it did, France 

 was prepared to plant against it no fewer than 400 mortars of large calibre, 

 besides all the other siege-ordnance, each furnished with 1,000 rounds of 

 shell, sufficient for a continuous bombardment during twenty days and 

 nights, at the rate of fourteen bomb-shells per minute. The siege-works out- 

 side Sebastopol, led to the construction, sooner or later, of more than one 

 hundred batteries. Marshal Vaillant estimates the whole weight of the 

 artillery, guns and ammunition, and all the appliances, at 50,000,000 kilo- 

 grammes about 5(3,000 tons English all carried over sea from France 

 to the Crimea. 



But the engineering materials the materiel da, genie were over and 

 above all those hitherto mentioned. The sappers, miners, engineers, all 

 who were employed in trench duty, mechanical labor, and the like, had im- 

 plements and materials in immense variety and number. Picks, shovels, 

 boring-tools, sand-bags, palisades, chevaux-de-frise, ventilators, smoke-balls, 

 mills, capstans, ladders, carriages, chests, wheels, planks, iron bars, nails, 

 pitch, tar, candles, charcoal, canvas, mining-powder, tents, wooden huts 

 all these gave a total in weight of 14,000,000 kilogrammes, 14,000 tons. 

 Among the largest items were 920,000 sand-bags, and 3,000 wooden huts or 

 barracks. The marshal states that the materiel du genie was five times as 

 great as would have been required, with the same strength of army, for a 

 siege conducted under ordinary circumstances ; so exceptional and remark- 

 able was everything connected with the attack on Sebastopol, especially the 

 wintering on a bleak barren plateau. The engineers, during the siege, con- 

 structed fifty miles of trench, in which they used 60,000 facines or bundles 

 of fagots, 80,000 gabions or baskets for earth, and nearly 1,000,000 bags 

 filled with earth ; besides ten miles of " lines," or defence-works, on the 

 margin of the siege-camp, to prevent the besiegers from being themselves be- 

 sieged. These " lines " were not mere heaps of earth hastily thrown up ; 

 they were deep trenches, excavated mostly in solid rock, breasted by thick 

 and high parapets, and defended at intervals by strong redoubts. Besides 

 all this, the French and the Russians, during their antagonistic operations 

 of mining and counter-mining, formed no less than five miles of subterrane- 

 ous galleries or passages in the solid rock, in some places as much as fifty 

 feet below the surface of the ground. 



Those readers who may feel bewildered at these vast military operations, 

 will have less difficulty in appreciating the necessity for enormous supplies 



