16 E. Maclagan — On Early Asiatic Fire Weapons. m. Q j 



The number of guns that could be brought into use was for a long time 

 very moderate, and they therefore did not at once supersede the previous 

 contrivances. The English were among the first, after the properties of 

 gunpowder had become known, to employ big guns. It was in the early 

 part of the fourteenth century that this mode of applying gunpowder was 

 first practised in Europe; and from that time it slowly advanced. # The 

 Batlistarius, once an important official in our English fortresses, made way 

 perhaps more rapidly in Britain than elsewhere, but not all at once, for the 

 Master Gunner. In the East, the Naft-andaz, or naphtha-thrower, was the 

 co-ad jut or of the Manjaniki who worked the engines ; and these have in 

 due course been succeeded by the familiar Gol-andaz of the Indian native 

 armies, f 



Guns were brought into the field by the English at Creci in 1346. It 

 is said by Tytler and others that Froissart makes no mention of the guns 



Accedit pyrius pulvis— &c, &c. 



Dicite vos, Furiae, qua gaudet origine monstrum ? 



Inventa Belliea. 

 Milton, with the same feeling, ascribes the invention of both cannon and powder to 

 Infernal agency. Far. Lost, B. VI. 



* Chaucer, in a poem written probably about the end of the third quarter of the 

 fourteenth century, — the transition period of artillery in Britain, — borrows illustrations 

 from both the old and the new descriptions of military engines. It is in a didactic pas- 

 sage in u The Souse of Fame ", in which he discourses on the nature of sound. 

 Soun is nought but air y-broken 

 And every speeche that is spoken, 

 Whe'r loud or privy, foule or fair, 

 In his substance ne is but air. 

 After this, in noticing various descriptions of sound, he says, 

 And the noise which that I heard, 

 For all the world right so it fered, 

 As doth the routing of the stone 

 That fro the engine is letten gone. 

 And again, 



Throughout every region 

 Y-went this foule trompes soun, 

 As swift as pellet out of gonne 

 When fire is in the powder ronne.* 

 f It is by a fine oriental figure of speech, and with no reference, now, to pyrotech a 

 zxic functions of any kind, that another familiar Indian official, of humble rank, is styled 

 a Barq-anddz, or ' darter of lightning' . 



* One of the early kinds of cannon " was fired by applying a metal bar made red 

 hot in the furnace to the powder contained in the chamber." Viollet U Due, Mil Arch 



of Mid. Ages, 172, 



