500 The Recent Gun-Cotton Explosion. October, 



time is prone to rapid decomposition, followed after a time 

 by spontaneous ignition. A small quantity of bad cotton 

 would not only decompose of itself, but likewise contaminate 

 and perhaps set fire to good pyroxylin in its immediate 

 neighbourhood, so that even minute charges of the inferior 

 material are necessarily very dangerous in a confined maga- 

 zine. The evidence we possess of the state of the magazines, 

 roofed in with slate, and exposed for days to the full glare 

 of an August sun, seems quite sufficient to us to account 

 for the decomposition of any impure gun-cotton, and of this 

 there was evidently a goodly portion at Stowmarket^ seeing 

 that the Government supply was admitted to be of a picked 

 and specially good nature. 



The manager of the works, in reference to the disaster, 

 speaks, it is true, of two separate events, the first of which 

 he specifies as an explosion, and the second as a detonation 

 of fearful force. Another witness testifies to seeing a flare- 

 up previously to the report, and both these statements are 

 doubtless quite correct. It may have been that a detona- 

 tion of some portion of the cotton followed the first milder 

 form of explosion, and wrought a great part of the damage ; 

 but in any case the primary phenomenon was the spon- 

 taneous ignition of a large mass of the cotton, and we may 

 confine ourselves, therefore, to seeking the reason of this 

 first catastrophe. 



It is, we believe, conceded by most of the witnesses, both 

 scientific and unscientific, that the cause of the calamity 

 was certainly due to the presence of free acid in the com- 

 pressed cotton, which should instead have presented an 

 alkaline, or at any rate a neutral, reaction. How did this 

 acid, then, come into the cotton ? The explanation received 

 by the jury, and which can scarcely be deemed satisfactory 

 even by its advocates, is that the acid was wilfully and 

 deliberately put into the cotton, by some disaffected person, 

 although, as the coroner could not help admitting, there was 

 singularly enough no motive or suspicion pointing to such 

 an infamous act. To us, we must say, there seems as much 

 direct evidence to warrant this belief as there was to support 

 the hypotheses that the explosion resulted from the falling 

 of a meteoric stone, or from the act of a foreign emissary, 

 both of which plausible solutions have been suggested. 

 True, a certain amount of sulphuric acid was found in 

 portions of the bad gun-cotton, which could not of course 

 have existed therein if the material had been but tolerably 

 washed in the first instance ; but it is surely somewhat rash 

 on this frail circumstantial evidence alone to deduce proof 



