62 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and mechanism, the gaseous motor for gun-projectiles should be com- 

 posed as at first. The explanation is difficult. Gunpowder occupies 

 a sort of half-way ground between things innocent and things danger- 

 ous; a medium quality favoring its many applications. Exploding 

 readily enough for all convenient needs, it never spontaneously ex- 

 plodes a great point in its favor. Then its power of water-absorption 

 not being very great, it stores tolerably well. But, more than any thing 

 else, gunpowder has held its long and almost exclusive sway over gnns 

 and gunners owing to the two following circumstances : it can be 

 made of any desired percentage composition, and it may be corned or 

 grained to any degree of coarseness or fineness. As employed for dif- 

 ferent purposes, it is necessary that gunpowder should have various 

 strengths. To a considerable extent the strength of gunpowder, by 

 varying the relative amount of its components, can be modified ; but 

 the great adjustive resource consists in increasing or lessening the di- 

 mension of its grains. 



Having taken account of certain special good qualities of gun- 

 powder, we now come to certain of its bad qualities. Safe it indeed is 

 in the sense of not igniting spontaneously; but it deteriorates by keep- 

 ing, the more especially if in a moist atmosphere. If gunpowder be 

 thoroughly wetted, then may it be considered wholly spoilt. In burn- 

 ing, gunpowder evolves much heat, much smoke ; it also dejwsits much 

 foulness. On the debtor side of gunpowder must be reckoned, also, the 

 danger attendant on manufacture. It would be a great advantage if 

 possible to devise a gunpowder that should acquire its usefully-danger- 

 ous qualities with the very last manufacturing touch, whereby in every 

 incipient stage it might be stored without possibility of risk. 



It will have been gathered, then, that gunpowder, ordinary black 

 gunpowder, though it has seen some service and done some hard duty 

 in its time, is not so perfect as to fulfil all requisitions desired ; where- 

 fore from time to time experiments have been directed to the manufac- 

 ture of a substitute. 



The only substitute yet invented which has met with favorable no- 

 tice from practical sportsmen is Schultze's wood-powder, which, from 

 its being granulated, and consequently permeated by air, can never 

 generate fire of itself. This explosive, invented by Captain Schultze, 

 a Prussian officer, was originally manufactured at Potsdam, near Berlin, 

 and the factory catching fire in 1868, instead of exploding ruining the 

 neighborhood, and leaving many widows and orphans, like the recent 

 gun-cotton explosion at Stowmarket burned quietly to the ground. A 

 company of English gentlemen, fond of field-sports, foreseeing the ad- 

 vantages to be derived from its introduction into England, purchased 

 a site for its production in the New Forest, and thither we must carry 

 our readers on " a visit to the Schultze Gunpowder manufactory," at 

 Iiedbridge near Southampton. 



Here and there, at intervals wide apart, are various buildings of 



