104 REPORT—1862. 
ingenuity, depended upon iron alone. The Ordnance Select Committee were 
challenged to bring forward the best gun their artillery science, aided by all 
the resources of the Royal arsenals and the public purse, was able to provide. 
The science brought to bear by the Ordnance Select Committee, after exhausting 
itself in repeated efforts to cover its repeated defeats (efforts that were fruit- 
less for reasons that will be explained), was at length compelled to confess 
itself vanquished. But Ordnance had other resources which it hoped to have 
dispensed with, and upon which in its disappointment it was glad to fall back: 
it said to the Committee of Defence, “If you will obligingly set up your 
armour-targets within a shortened range (say, for instance, a Robin Hood 
bowshot of 200 yards), you shall see what the brute force of the old smooth- 
bore will do. True it is that cast iron will be brought to attack wrought 
iron—that a rounded missile will have to punch its way through a flat and 
possibly at times inclined armour-plate—science, which proved but a broken 
reed in our hands, must be abandoned; but with a gun big enough, a shot 
heavy enough, a charge of powder large enough, and a range short enough, 
the smooth-bore shall smash your target.’ Of course it would; and so would 
a battering-ram like those Titus used to break the gates of Jerusalem. If 
therefore the old smooth-bore had failed the Ordnance Committee, like the 
service rifled gun, they might have fallen back on the older battering-ram. 
Looking at it from a scientific point of view, this retrogression was very 
humiliating, and it caused the country serious anxiety to hear Her Majesty’s 
Ministers state in Parliament, as they did in the last session, on the authority, 
of course, of their official scientific advisers, that the Navy of England, after 
all the vast expenditure that had been lavished upon it, was at last obliged to 
be armed with the old smooth-bores to meet the iron-clad navies of her pos- 
sible enemies. This was indeed proclaiming England’s weakness to other 
nations who were more scientifically informed and better armed than she. 
In further explanation of what was the actual condition in which this all- 
important question stood no later than May last, I will quote the statement 
of Sir William Armstrong, who, at a meeting of the United Service Institu- 
tion, May 20, 1862, expressed himself in these words :—“ It certainly may be 
said that shells are of no avail against iron-plated ships; but, on the ocher 
hand, I may say that neither 68-pounders nor 110-pounder guns with solid 
round shot are effective against such iron vessels. The fact is, what we want 
is a gun, in addition to our 110-pounder rifled gun, especially adapced for 
breaking through iron plates. That is what we are in want of now.” This 
statement made in 1862 was very startling to all of us, who knew that long ago 
France armed her ‘Gloires’ and ‘ Normandies’ with rifled 90-pounders said 
to be efficient against iron plates. Such being the state of the question a few 
months back, we may proceed to consider, first, the reason why the artillery 
hitherto employed in the service, including rifled guns and smooth-bores, has 
always failed to make any impression on the plated defences at ordinary 
fighting-range; and secondly, by what means artillery scie: ce has lately re- 
conquered its lost ground. Sir William Armstrong put the case very plainly 
when he said that shells were in fact of no avail against plated ships, and that 
the solid shot of the 110-pounder rifled gun was not effective against srch 
iron vessels, But late experiments at Shoeburyness, in which the ‘ Warrior’ 
target was pierced and shattered at 600 yards, have proved that the case as 
put by Sir William Armstrong was based on his experience of shells that 
were not made of the proper form, nor of the proper material, and on his ex- 
perience of rifled guns that were unable to propel their projectiles with the 
requisite velocity. 
