36 
LAND & WATER 
December 7, 1916 
{Continued from page 34) 
event. Artillery — originally arcualia from arcus, a bow 
— was soon in general use, and curiously enough very early 
in its development we find breech-loading introduced. 
There is still preserved, in London, a breech -loading .gun 
recovered from a man-of-war called the Mary Rose, 
which was sunk off Spithead in 1545, by the weight of her 
o\vn armament. The crew of 600 men perished. The 
gun was 8J inches in diameter, 8J feet long, and consisted 
of an iron cylinder with an overlap throughout its length. 
Iron rings three~inches square, which were apparently 
driven on whilst hot, bouncl the tube securely at intervals. 
It was bolted to its heavy wjoden bed. and the breech 
Mods Meg, Scottish Gun of Fifteenth Century. 
v- ^_ 
L, 
Turkish Gun of Fifteenth Century. 
was kept in place by a block of elm. The famous Mons 
Meg, a wrought-iron muzzle-loading cannon, now in Edin- 
burgh Castle, and until lately shot daily, .was fashioned 
in the fifteenth century, and was used in the bombardment 
of Dumbarton Castle in 1489. It has a bore of 30 inches 
and fired a grimite ball 330 lbs. in weight. Another 
remarkable cr.nuon is.described by Gibbon in his Decline 
and Fall of the Roman Empire., It belonged to the 
Turks and was -used. in the siege of Constantinople in 
1543. It W.1S made of brass, fired a 600 lb. stone pro- 
jectile, and it occupied thirty wagons in transit, these 
bemg drav.n by 60 oxen. To smooth the way and 
strengthen the bridges 250 men were necessary, whilst 
200 other., steadied it on the wagons. Two months were 
occupied in transporting it 150 miles, and with its end 
buned in the ground its rate of fire was seven shots a day ! 
Illustrations of these two guns are reproduced from The 
Engineering of Ordnance by the courtesy of the author, 
Sir Arthur Trevor Dawson, the eminent artillery authority.' 
Gradually artillery was improved, it was made lighter 
and more mobile for use in the field, its power was increased 
and regulariy constructed organisations were created to 
handle it in war in the most effective manner. Notwith- 
standing . the eariy . use .of breech-loading, the muzzle 
loading smooth-bore 'system prevailed until the last 
half of .the nineteenth century. Between the highly- 
developed automatic breech-loading rifled guns of to-day 
shooting elongated projectiles (sometimes weighing as 
much as a ton) and the old system which existed for over 
500 years, roughly 50 years only have elapsed. Black 
Eowder has given way to smokeless propellants invented 
y Alfred Nobel, and high explosive bursting charges 
have come into use in combination with the most accurate 
time and percussion fuses, all within this comparatively 
limited space of time. The old mortars uec 1 for high 
angle indirect lire have ^radnaliv taken the form of the 
howitzer as we know it to-day. Muzzle-loading mortars 
have not, however,- become -quite obsolete, for' they arc 
used quite extensively in 'the trcnchco iii France f'.r 
throwing bombs — great and small. Rate of fire, accuracy 
and range have been enormously improved, but the ultima 
thiile has not even yet been reached. 
In 1742 the celebrated English philosopher Robins — 
the father of scientific gunnery — ^produced his work 
called New Principles of Gunnery. In this he disproved 
Galileo's theory of parabolic trajectory, and he foretold 
the advantages that were to be derived by the nation 
that first adopted an elongated projectile spun on its 
longer axis by rifling in the barrel. Not until the best 
part of a century after was effect given to this remarkable 
advice. On all fours is the neglect of another famous 
Englishman's discovery. About 1850 General John 
Jacobs found by experiment that by sharpening the nose 
of a bullet its " air boring " capacity was increased and 
its trajectory flattened. The information was open to the 
world, but not until the end of the last century was 
advantage taken of it. Then the Germans intraduced 
the " Spitzer " bullet, of a shape which has lonly quite 
recently been given to our own bullet. The French 
quickly followed the Germans. Their bullet has a sharp 
" Spitzer " like nose, and is besides partly pointed at the 
base, so that as a whole it takes the shape of a boat. The 
taper base is supposed to give an added advantage in 
flight by reducing " air sucKing," but that remains yet 
to be proved. 
The machine gun — no doubt the most important arm 
used in the present war — is of comparatively recent 
origin. There are records of early revolving ordnance, 
but a type of machine gun— called a requa battery of 
organ gun — seems first to hav» been employed at the 
siege of Charlestown in 1863. It had 25 barrels, arranged 
horizontally. The French invented the " mitrailleuse " 
and employed it very successfully in the F'lanco-Prussian 
war of 1870. Like the British Gatling gun illustrated, 
it was worked by hand. Maxim's great invention of 1883 
employs the gases of combustion to work the breech. This 
well-known " automatic " gun ha,s been adopted by prac- 
tically every civilized nation, and is used by the Germans 
in the present war. The French have their own Hotch- 
kiss and we have, besides the Maxim, the light Lewis 
gun, which has made history faster perhaps than any 
other gun has ever done. The Maxim is a " recoil " 
gun worked by the backward thrust of the gases against 
the base of the cartridge, and is water-cooled. The Lewis 
is the invention of an American ordnance officer. It 
weighs only 26 lb., and can be used, therefore, in attack 
as well as in defence. The Germans— always expert 
cribbers and adapters of the work of foreign inventors— 
Gatling Battery Gun 
One of the earliest British machine guns 
have quickly grasped its advantages if the recent report 
be true that they are now using machine guns of about 
the same weight. 
Small-arms commenced their career in the form of hand 
cannons or small bombards about -1400. They first 
consisted of a vented tube .simply fixed to a straight piece 
of wood. The charge was fired with a match. \\ ilkinsoii, 
in his book Engines of War, says "Small fire-arms appear 
to have been introduced into the English army in 1471. 
wiien Edward the Fourth, landing' at Ravcnspur, in 
Yorksliire, brought with him, among other forces, 300 
' ' • (CoHtinueil on pay yj) 
