1864. ] Russreiyt on Gun-cotton. 41] 
engineer wishes to remove a mountain of stone out of the way of a 
locomotive engine ; and the military engineer to drive his way into 
the fortress of an enemy, or to destroy the obstacles purposely laid in 
his way. This is a new phase of duty for gun-cotton—it is the work 
of direct destruction. In artillery youdo not want to destroy directly, 
but indirectly. You don’t want to burst your gun, nor even to injure 
it ; and, we have seen, in order to secure this, you have only to give 
it room. 
The fifth principle, therefore, is, to make it destructive—to cause 
it to shatter everything to pieces which it touches, and for this 
purpose you have only to deprive it of room. Give it room, and it 
is obedient ; imprison it, and it rebels. Shut up without room, there 
is nothing tough enough or strong enough to stand against it. 
To carry this into effect, the densest kind of gun-cotton must be 
used. It must no longer consist of fine threads or hollow textures 
wound on roomy cores. All you have to do is to make it dense, 
solid, hard. Twist it, squeeze it, ram it, compress it; and insert 
this hard, dense cotton rope or cylinder or cake in a hole in a rock, 
or the drift of a tunnel, or the bore of a mine; close it up, and it will 
shatter it to pieces. In a recent experiment, 6 ounces of this 
material set to work in a tunnel not only brought down masses which 
powder had failed to work, but shook the ground under the feet of 
the engineers in a way never done by the heaviest charges of powder. 
To make gun-cotton formidable and destructive, squeeze it and 
close it up; to make it gentle, slow, and manageable, ease it and give 
it room. To make gunpowder slow and gentle, you do just the con- 
trary: you cake, condense, and harden it to make it slow, safe for 
guns, and effective. 
To carry out this principle successfully, you have to carry it even 
to the extreme. Ask gun-cotton to separate a rock already half- 
separated, it will refuse to comply with your request. Give it a 
light burden of earth and open rock to lift, it will fail. If you want 
it to do the work, you must invent a ruse,—you must make believe 
that the work is hard, and it will be done. Invent a difficulty and 
put it between the cotton and its too easy work, and it will doit. The 
device is amazingly successful. If the cotton have work to do that 
is light and easy, you provide it with a strong box, which is hard to 
burst, a box of iron for example; close a small charge, that would be 
harmless, in a little iron box, and then place that box in the hole 
where formerly the charge exploded harmless, and in the effort it 
makes to burst that box, the whole of the light work will disappear 
before it. 
Of the effect of such an explosion, an illustration accompanies this 
paper. The two drawings represent two views of a stockade, in close 
contiguity to which a charge of 25 lbs. of gun-cotton, placed in an 
iron box, was employed, and the consequences will be seen in the two 
rent and shattered trees, the largest 20 ches in diameter, which 
were not only removed from their places, but by some unexplained 
action shattered throughout into matchwood, This explosion was the 
VOL. I. 2F 
