i873-J Recent Changes in British Artillery Materiel. 331 



The committee find that considerable quantities have 

 been sent during the past two or three years to hot and 

 damp climates, and have undergone voyages to Australia 

 and India without, so far as they can learn, any accident 

 whatever. They have also learnt that some gun-cotton 

 which was supplied by the Stowmarket Company in the 

 summer of 1870, and kept in a magazine on the Thames, 

 was subsequently sent to Calcutta, where it has been stored 

 for some months. A report recently received from Colonel 

 Kennard states that the gun-cotton shows no indication of 

 any change. 



The reports published in Austria furnish very satisfactory 

 evidence respecting the stability of gun-cotton, and a con- 

 sideration of them, together with the other evidence 

 adduced, has satisfied the committee that no hesitation 

 need be felt in continuing the employment of compressed 

 gun-cotton through any fear of undiscovered unstable 

 qualities. 



They have examined a considerable number of specimens 

 of gun-cotton, some of them purposely left impure, that 

 have been stored at Woolwich for several years past (several 

 specimens for periods as long as nine years) under varying 

 conditions of exposure to light, heat, and change of tem- 

 perature. Their present unaltered state furnishes fully 

 confirmatory testimony that under at least all ordinary 

 circumstances gun-cotton may be regarded as a stable 

 material. 



The experiments on stability of gun-cotton, extending 

 over a long period, refer to the material in the form of rope 

 or skeins, that is gun-cotton in the loose state, as distin- 

 guished from the substance compressed into blocks, or discs 

 from pulp, on Mr. Abel's system. But as it has been satis- 

 factorily proved to the committee that gun-cotton produced 

 from the long staple cotton cannot be so perfectly purified 

 as pulped gun-cotton, it follows that all the evidence in 

 favour of the stability of gun-cotton in the loose state applies 

 with much greater force to compressed gun-cotton, in the 

 purification of which the pulping process has been applied. 



As regards manufacture, the committee have made them- 

 selves acquainted with the nature of the several processes 

 constituting Mr. Abel's system up to the stage in which gun- 

 cotton is compressed into discs and ready for use. 



In all these processes the material, from the moment of 

 its conversion into gun-cotton and up to the drying stage, is 

 in a wet state, and at the final stage of leaving the press 

 contains from 15 to 20 per cent of water. It is throughout 



