Introduction. 



strong ruler was ordinarily a successful warrior whose 

 achievements were lavishly extolled in the works. To 

 this class must be ascribed the book of Valturius and some 

 of the treatises written by Cataneo, Colliado, and Tartaglia. 

 The more practical among this class of writers gave instruc- 

 tions for the manufacture of cannon, gunpowder, projectiles 

 and military fireworks ; for in those days, when it was usual 

 to build a cannon at the place where it was to be used, and 

 to break it up after it had served in the one siege, the 

 science of gun construction was a necessary part of the 

 knowledge of a good commander. Another class of writer 

 was that to which W. Bourne belonged, the practical 

 gunner. Very numerous are the treatises on the art of 

 aiming cannon, and the instruction of the " perfect canoneer " 

 seems to have included always a careful grounding in 

 elementary arithmetic and plane geometry. Thus the 

 historian and philosopher on the one hand repeated the 

 lore of ancient military commanders, with the addition of 

 elementary facts drawn from recent experiences, and some- 

 times gave indications of the application of natural law 

 to the flight of projectiles ; and on the other, master 

 gunners wrote practical instructions for the acquisition 

 of a difficult art and the study of elementary mathematics. 

 It was not until the epoch-marking book of Benjamin 

 Robins appeared, in 1742, that theoretical gunnery received 

 particular attention from the writers of technical books ; 

 from that date the works on artillery, instead of containing 

 rule-of-thumb descriptions, like those of Ufano, Saint 

 Julien, Gaya, and Siemenowicz, treated the principles of 

 gunnery more in the modern scientific manner. 



With reference to the manufacture of small arms, not 

 so much was written, but more probably than was written 

 of any other industrial art. It is hardly to be expected 

 that any practical art can have a considerable literature; 



