412 Original Articles. | July, 
first trial of English-made gun-cotton, and was made at Stowmarket, 
in spring. 
It is, therefore, the nature of gun-cotton to rise to the occasion and 
to exert force exactly in proportion to the obstacle it encounters. 
For destructive shells this quality is of the highest value. You can 
make your shell so strong that nothing can resist its entrance, and 
when arrived at its destination no shell can prevent its gun-cotton 
charge from shivering it to fragments. . 
These are the main principles in the mechanical manipulation of 
gun-cotton which will probably render it for the future so formidable 
an instrument of war. Resistances too great for gunpowder only 
suffice to elicit the powers of gun-cotton. On the other hand, in its 
elementary state as the open cotton yarn, it is playful, slow, gentle, 
and obedient; there is scarcely any mechanical drudgery you can 
require of it that it is not as ready and fit to do as steam, or gas, or 
water, or other elementary power. 
Tn conclusion, I may be asked to say as a mechanic what I think 
can be the nature and source of this amazing power of gun-cotton. In 
reply let me ask, Who shall say what takes place in that pregnant in- 
stant of time when a spark of fire enters the charge, and one-hundredth 
part of a second of time suffices to set millions of material atoms loose 
from fast ties of former affinity, and leaves them free every one to 
elect his mate, and uniting in a new bond of affinity, to come out of 
that chamber a series of new-born substances ? Who shall tell me all 
that happens then? I will not dare to describe the phenomena of 
that pregnant instant. But I will say this, that it is an instant of in- 
tense heat—one of its new-born children is a large volume of steam 
and water. When that intense heat and that red-hot steam were 
united in the chamber of that gun and that mine, two powers were met 
whose union no matter yet contrived has been strong enough to 
compress and confine. When I say that a gun-cotton gun is a steam- 
gun, and when I say that at that stant of intense heat, the atoms of 
water and the atoms of fire are in contact atom to atom, it is hard 
to believe that it should not give rise to an explosion infinitely 
stronger than any case of the generation of steam by filtering the 
heat leisurely through the metal skins of any high-pressure boiler. 
