involved in the Construction of Artillei'y. 327 



mistake. The earliest bronze guns, both in Europe and Asia, were cast without trunnions, 

 dolphins, rings, or breech-buttons. The recoil was resisted by the flat breech abutting 

 firmly against the heavy timber stocks on which they were mounted. 



About 1378 the first examples occur of the adoption of spherical shot of cast-iron. Cast- 

 iron, as a peculiar form of iron, and its capability of being fused, had long been known; the 

 possibility of moulding and casting it into determinate forms must have early resulted from 

 the daily observations of the workers in the smelting forges on the Catalan method, and in 

 those of the Thuringian forest; though but little early use appears to have been made of a 

 discovery upon which so much of the subsequent power and progress of mankind have de- 

 pended. The stone balls of the archaic artillery, however, light, brittle, irregular in form and 

 texture, slow and costly in formation, found a valued substitute in cast-iron, which seems 

 to have been first used in France by Les Freres Bureau, about 1429, under the IMaid of 

 Orleans, in the wars with the English (L. Napoleon, " Passe et I'Avenir d'Artillerie"). 



The increased density of iron over stone, rapidly necessitated the reduction in caliber 

 of the older bombards. The manufacture of powder was improving as it became an estab- 

 lished European want ; saltpetre was better known, and rather less impure ; the original 

 wrought-iron guns were no longer safe. The facilities which moulding and casting in 

 bronze gave, suggested the advantage and use of trunnions and of dolphins or rings, 

 whose formation in wrought-iron was so difficult, and of uniting the chase and chamber 

 into one mass, which in bronze were easier made together than in separate fitting pieces, 

 and thus heavy artillery assumed something like the general form of cylindric bore and 

 conic exterior that it has ever since borne. 



The large reduction in caliber, due to the change of material in shot, increased the 

 facilities of using bronze, in the same proportion that it rendered practically difficult the 

 adaptation of the ancient method of built-up wrought-iron cannon. With the then known 

 methods of smelting and of working iron, bronze guns were now, in fact, the cheaper mode 

 of construction, notwithstanding the higher price of bronze, which, however, was relatively 

 nearer in price as raw material to iron than it is now. The bronze gun was found less 

 dependent upon the care and skill of the workman at every step, and the power of orna- 

 mentation was given. Perhaps potentates and powers saw, too, that in bronze guns they 

 possessed a material capable of conversion into treasure at any moment. These, and other 

 minor circumstances, all tended to the rapid increase of bronze artillery, and to the neolect 

 and final abandonment of that of wrought-iron. By 1450, the former were in common 

 use; and by the end of the fifteenth century the latter had fallen wholly into disuse. An 

 interesting example of the transition period occurs at the Repository, Woolwich, in 

 one of two wrought-iron hoop guns (about 12-pounders) of the time of Henry VI., 

 1422. These guns are about 8 feet long, nearly cylindrical externally, with two plies of 

 longitudinal bars, and one of hoops. One of them is imperfect; the perfect one has a 



2 U 2 



