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solid or well-established basis may be concluded from the remark made by 
Decker a little further on : “ II n’y a que Vexperience de Geissler.: mais 
qui en garantit Vauthenticity’—Experiences sur les Shrapnels , p. 14. 
But supposing it could be incontestably established that <f des bombes 
remplies de balles de plomb ” were fired at the siege of Lille, does this fact 
of itself deprive General Shrapnel of the credit of the invention ? In my 
opinion certainly not. To my mind the absence of any mention of these 
projectiles in the numerous works treating of the history of artillery (with 
the exceptions I have mentioned) is convincing proof that although pro¬ 
jectiles resembling Shrapnel shells may have been used in the 17th Century 
they were not intended to serve the same end as General Shrapnel’s shell 
and were constructed on a different principle . 
I believe that the bullets were placed inside to act merely as so many 
additional splinters, the effect of which, according to the idea of the inventor, 
would depend upon the same causes as the ordinary splinters of ordinary 
shells, viz. upon the bursting charge of the shell, and in no way upon the 
communicated motion of the projectile, and the velocity with which it might 
be travelling at the moment of rupture; while, doubtless, in addition, their 
weight was thought advantageous as increasing the density of the projectile. 
My reasons for holding this opinion are as follows:— 
1st, The first appreciation and application of so important a principle in 
gunnery as that involved in the proper action of the Shrapnel shell, would 
surely not have been passed over without remark by the authors of the military 
histories of those times. 
2ndly, If the principle had been known to the artillerists of this epoch, 
it seems strange that no further efforts should have been made to apply it 
more successfully than in these first rude attempts, and that a century and a 
quarter should have elapsed before the subject was again practically, or, for 
aught we know, theoretically, taken up. 
Brdly, All difficulty in accounting for the disappearance of projectiles of 
the nature described by Piobert, and for the absence of any mention of them 
in the works to-which I have alluded, vanishes if we adopt the explanation 
suggested above, that the bullets were placed inside to increase the weight 
of the projectile and to act as so many additional splinters, for a very slight 
experience,—the experience which one siege may have afforded,—must have 
served to show that shells of this construction, and intended to act on this 
principle, were of little real service. And the complete failure which must 
have speedily followed an attempt to introduce shells constructed on these 
erroneous principles would sufficiently account for the absence of any general 
mention of them, and of all attempts to improve upon them—facts which I 
know not how to account for in any other way. 
4thly, There is no doubt that shells have been thus constructed,— 
contracted, that is to say, with a number of bullets added to them with the 
object of increasing the number of splinters, for the following passage occurs 
in an old work written sometime in the 17th Century, by Casimir Simie- 
