334 Mr. Mallet on the Physical Conditions 



Feet. Indies. 

 Extreme length, 16 4 



Caliber, 8 



Diameter at base ring, 3 3 



Diameter at first reinforce 2 2-^ 



Diameter at second reinforce, . . . . 2 11 J 



Diameter at muzzle, 2 



Its proportions indicate a good deal of knowledge of the relative strains at various 

 points along the length of the axis; but the metal is badly distributed, owing to sudden 

 changes in the diameter, &c. Although highly ornamented, and most of the inscriptions 

 and relievo- work well brought up, the casting is, as a gun, bad, porous, and vesicular; 

 and the bronze is obviously an uncertain ternary or quaternary alloy. I incline to 

 believe that it was cast upon a core, and with the muzzle down. The tasteless gun-car- 

 riage of cast-iron, painted to imitate bronze, upon which the gun rests, was made in 

 England. 



Interesting as it would be to pursue the history of artillery down from the seventeenth 

 century to the present, it falls not within the scope of a Note, already too long ; for this 

 the great work of the present Emperor Napoleon, " Sur le passe et I'Avenir d'Artillerie ;" 

 Marion, " Recueil sur les Bouches a Feu les plus Remarkable ;" and others, may be con- 

 sulted. My object has been to present a sketch, only, of the origin and early history of 

 gunpowder and of artillery, conceived, as I believe, in a more philosophic spirit than that 

 in which the subject has been treated (so fiir as my information goes) by professed archa;o- 

 logists, — by viewing the subject, not by the mere dim lamp of scholarship only, but 

 upon the broad principles that regulate all human material progress, and in relation to the 

 endowments in natural substances and conditions, which have been locally given or with- 

 held from nations, and to the great movements in time of the human family upon the 

 earth. And thus examined, it would seem that, as in the kindred art of Fortification, no 

 individual claim can be established to its two most salient inventions, earthwork and the 

 bastion, but that they grew up with the necessities that called them forth ; — so can no 

 personal claim to inventorship, for either gunpowder or cannon, be sustained, nor even for 

 priority of publication in Europe, of discoveries that most probably originated at the earliest 

 seats and in the earliest epochs of mankind, and by the (so-called) accidental results of the 

 observation of phenomena, produced by the reactions of some of the spontaneous produc- 

 tions of nature, in some of the most primitive operations or arts of man. 



A second object has been, to dissipate the argument that has been drawn from the 

 early abandonment of wrought-iron cannon, against the use of this material for ordnance 

 at the present day, by showing what were the true conditions and circumstances that 

 affected and produced that change. 



