Prof. Schoenbein o« the Discovery of Gun-CoUon, 11 



by the able engineer, Mr. Richard Taylor of Falmouth, I 

 made numerous experiments in the mines of Cornwall, which 

 were entirely successful, in the opinion of all competent wit- 

 nesses. Experiments on the action of gun-cotton were also 

 made in several parts of England, under my direction, both 

 with small fire-arms and with pieces of artillery, and the re- 

 sults obtained were very satisfactory. 



Until that time there had been little or nothing said of 

 gun-cotton in France ; and it will appear that the short notices 

 which Mr. Grove gave at Southampton at the meeting of the 

 British Association, and the experiments with which he ac- 

 companied them, served first to attract the attention of French 

 chemists to this substance. At Paris, the thing was at first 

 considered hardly credible, and jokes even were passed upon 

 it ; but when there could no longer remain any doubt as to 

 the reality of the discovery, and when several chemists in 

 Germany and other countries had published the processes 

 which they employed to prepare the gun-cotton, then a lively 

 interest was manitiested in a subject which had just before ex- 

 cited derision, and it was soon pretended that the new explo- 

 sive substance was an old French discovery. It was declared 

 to be nothing more than the xyloidine first discovered by M. 

 Braconnot, and afterwards investigated anew by M. Pelouze, 

 and the only merit left me was to have conceived the happy 

 idea of putting this substance into a gun-barrel. The know- 

 ledge of the composition of xyloidine ought to have sufficed 

 to convince those who put forward that opinion, that it is not 

 suited for fire-arms, on account of its containing too much 

 carbon and too little oxygen for the chief part to be converted 

 into gaseous matters during the combustion. It was moreover 

 very easy to discover the essential differences which exist be- 

 tween the xyloidine of Braconnot and gun-cotton. Never- 

 theless the error was kept up for some months. 



Matters stood thus, when, on the 4th of last November, a 

 Scotch chemist, Mr. Walter Crum of Glasgow, published a 

 memoir, in which he showed that gun-cotton is not the same 

 product as xyloidine, but that it presents an essentially differ- 

 ent composition ; and towards the end of the same month, the 

 French Academy received a communication of the same na- 

 ture. The gun-cotton was then no longer xyloidine, it was 

 called pyroxyloidine, and the first was admitted to be unsuit- 

 able for fire-arms. 



If, therefore, it is proved that from the commencement of 

 1846 I prepared gun-cotton, and applied it to the discharge 

 of fire-arms, and that M. Bcetlger did the same in the month 

 of August, — if it be admitted that xyloidine cannot serve the 



