guns are much stronger. This is an obvious advantage, but an equally solid one is the fact that owing to the greater weight of the home-made weapon the recoil energy is less and consequently

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Fig. 54. — Metallic Cartridge Case.

the mounting can be made of a lighter pattern. Besides, the weight of the gun is so disposed as to bring its centre of gravity as near the breech end as possible; by this means the radius of the gun house is reduced to the smallest dimension and, in consequence, there is a great .saving of weight of armour. The extra weight of the gun is therefore more than compensated for.

Until late into the 16th century the calibres of the guns were not regulated with a view to the interchangeability of shot. In the following century ordnance was divided into classes, but even then, owing no doubt to manufacturing difficulties, there was no fixed size for the bore. The Tables II.-VII. give some idea of the size and weight of these pieces.

Table II. is taken from Cleveland's Notes, but corrected from “An Old Table of Ordnance” (Proc. R.A.I., vol. xxviii. p. 365); the last column gives the range in scores of paces at point-blank, a term tiscci in those days to denote the first part of the trajectory which was supposed to be a straight line. Later the point-blank range was that distance from the gun on its carriage to the first graze of the shot on the horizontal plane when the axis of the gun was placed horizontal; this depended on the height of the gun above the ground plane, but it was the only method of determining the relative power of these early guns.

In power, smooth-bore guns in Europe did not differ very much from each other, and it may be taken for granted that the progress made since has been much the same in all.

D’Antoni, in his Treatise of Fire Arms (translated by Captain Thomson, R.A.), gives particulars of Italian guns of about 1746, which are shown in Table III.

It will be seen that the velocities given in Table III. are not inferior to those obtained from guns actually in use in 1860 (see Table IV.). They were considerably higher than those for elongated rifled projectiles (Table V.) for many years after their introduction; the last-named, however, during flight only lost their velocity slowly, while the spherical shot lost their velocity so rapidly that at 2000 yds. range only about one-third of the initial velocity was retained.