involved in the Construction of Artillery. 317 



writings, the lore, the knowledge of the productions, the arts and sciences, of the lands and 

 peoples amongst whom they travelled. They carried back these acquisitions to their own 

 monasteries, and they communicated them to their clerkly brethren, as they made their 

 rounds of visits, from religious house to house; and thus it was, that from the seclusion 

 and silence of the cloister and the cell were echoed, in the furthest North and West, the 

 inventions, the arts, the discoveries, of distant lands and foreign people ; the announcement 

 of which— as in the instances of Bacon and of Schwartz, with gunpowder — bear to us now 

 at first the impressions of original discovery made by the men themselves, as if buried in 

 the solitude of study, which were, in fact, most often but gathered from those of their 

 itinerant brethren who were then the great news-venders of the world. The conclusion, 

 therefore, seems justifiable, that gunpowder, known i'rom a remote antiquity in eastern 

 and southern Asia, was not independently re-invented or discovered in Europe; but that 

 the knowledge of it travelled westward with the Arabians, and with the returning bands of 

 pilgrims and crusaders fi-om Syria and Palestine ; and was introduced into the Levant and 

 Spain by the former, and into Scotland, England, and Germany, by the latter. 



But we must be brief; it is iinpossible, within the limits of a Note, even to sketch this 

 history perfectly, for to do so of any one discovery, is in many respects to write the history 

 of all human progress. Yet, much as has been penned by various authors on the subject, 

 we make bold to say, the real liislory of the discovery of gunpowder and of cannon, or 

 firearms generally, remains still to be written, and, whenever attempted with success, it will 

 be by him who shall be competent to unfold the lore laid up in Arabic MSS. in the 

 monasteries and palaces of Spain and of the East, and who shall endeavour to collect and 

 to collate the still extant records of the burgher cities of southern and central Europe, 

 and such other fiscal or state documents as may best develop the sources and channels 

 through which Europe was supplied with saltpetre and sulphur at the earliest periods, say 

 from the eleventh century. To these, rather than to the learned dust of alchemy, are we 

 to look for future information. 



The Saltpetre regale, by which, under a sort of royal patent, the right of searching for 

 and collecting incrustations of this salt, even from the walls of private dwellings, existed 

 amongst, and was hated by, the people of Germany, does not seem to have been known 

 anterior to the fifteenth century, if so early. Artillery, however, was common all over 

 Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century, and the total production of the regale 

 could not have supplied a tithe of the demand. Whence, then, was the supply? 



If gunpowder itself be admitted to have been known for an immense period in tlie 

 east of Asia, it is not conceivable that some forms of firearms, and cannon as the very 

 simplest, must not have been known there likewise. The corollary is too obvious and 

 simple, long to escape even a very barbarous people. 



From the early date of the notices already referred to, which make it so probable that 



VOL. xxm. 2 T 



