not much exceeding two feet, and the bow was bent by the windlass or moulinet.

Of the important buttering ram Pliny and others have made Epeus the inventor, during the siege of Troy; but as it is not mentioned by Homer, nor any Greek writer, Vitruvius and Tertullian more probably assign the invention to Pephasmenon, a Tyrian, in the army of Carthage, during the siege of Cadiz. There were three kinds of rams; one suspended, fig. 5; the second running upon rollers, fig. 3; the third carried by the men who worked it, fig. 5. At Haguenau, and Morviedro, the ancient Saguntum, are the remains of two: one is topped with a strong head of iron, square and of one piece; the other consists of three pieces, has a ram's head, and is similar to one on the arch of Severus. The ram was used in the middle ages; and Sir Christopher Wren, in throwing down old walls, found no machine equal to it, particularly in disjointing the stones. The momentum of one, twenty-eight inches diameter, 180 feet long, with a head of a ton and a half weighed 41,112 lbs. and worked by a thousand men, was about equal to a point-blank shot from a thirtysix pounder.

Hardly, perhaps, to be called artillery, but materially assisting their operations were the ancient musculus or testudo a covered machine, probably the subsequent sow, a very low shed, long and very sharp roofed; used to advance to the wall, and overturn it by sap. The pluteus, a machine covered with ozier work and hides, running upon three wheels, one in the middle, and two at the extremities. The cat, also a covered shed, occasionally fixed on wheels, and used for protecting soldiers employed in filling up the ditch, preparing the way for the movable tower, mining the wall,&c. Some of these cats had crenelles and chinks, from whence the archers could discharge their arrows. These were called castellated cats; and sometimes under cover of this machine, the beseigers worked a small kind of ram; fig. 4. Dr. Meyrick, from an ancient illumination, has engraved one of these, called the chaschateil or cat castle. It resembles in form a modern four-post bedstead upon wheels. A miner is working under it with a pick-axe. And to the same purpose the vinea, another shed, was applied.

The belfragium or belfroi, was a tower with stories, moved up to the walls. A cat, made of osier twigs and leather, and covered with planks, was used to protect those who filled up the ditches preparatory to wheeling upon them the belfries; from this use of the cat, was derived the French word eschaufaux, an elevated floor, and subsequently the English word scaffold. Elsewhere Dr. Meyrick says, the catti versatiles, were chats faulx furnished with drawbridges. The chief belfries were called brestachiæ or brestaches. William de Breton says, he caused to be made double brestaches in seven different places. These were wooden castles, very highly fortified, surrounded with double quadrangular fosses, at a proportionate distance from each other, with drawbridges thrown across them, and he had not only these filled with armed men, but the interior surface of each foss, and

thus he surrounded the besieged by his works Such wooden castles were also called bastiles An interesting print of a movable belfroi is given by Grose. It consists of a ground-floor occupied by a ram, and four upper stories by archers and cross-bowmen; the highest story rose above the walls, and from that directly below, a drawbridge was let down, and rested upon the wall; see our fig. 3. Some of these towers used by the early ancients were of amazing magnitude, being with pyramids twenty, fifteen, or ten stages or floors.

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The prickly cat, or felis echinata, was a beam, bristled with oaken teeth, which, being hung at an embrazure, could be let down upon enemy. For the same purpose was used the fistuca bellica or war-hammer, fitted with curved nails and hooks, and suspended by a chain, to draw up the enemy from below.

Missive wheels were formed of mill-stones joined by an oaken axis, and let down upon besiegers; missive chariots were rolled down an inclined plane, and retained by chains to discharge hot or cold stones. In the middle age the machines were commonly made upon the spot. Hogsheads full of stones were used in the reign of Edward I. as a protecting rampart to defend the workmen in sieges.

SECT. II.-OF MODERN ARTILLERY. According to Du Cange the word artillery (ars telaria, meaning bows, arrows, and all implements of war,) first occurs in Rymer. Grose is confirmed by Dr. Meyrick in assigning the introduction of it to the fourteenth century.

Cannon called dolia ignivoma, or fire-flashing vessels, in Spain, were known in Italy as early as the year 1351, and were used by our Edward III. They were termed by the French, gunnæ, and appear at first to have been of two kinds— a large one for discharging stones, called a bombard, and a smaller sort for discharging darts or quarrels. In 1377, 1 Richard II. Thomas Norbury was directed to provide from Thomas Restwold of London, two great and two less engines, called cannons, 600 stone shot for the same, and salt-petre, charcoal, and other ammunition, for stores, to be sent to the castle of Bristol. At the first invention of cannon, darts and bolts were shot from them; but, before these, stones were used instead, for, in 1388; a stone bullet, which weighed 195 lbs., was discharged from a bombard called the trevisan.

The bombard was so called from the Greek Boußos, which expressed the noise it made in the firing. It was a Greek invention, and there is some reason to conceive that gunpowder owed its origin to the same people. At first used only in fire-works amusively, its discovery is involved in obscurity. From a tract on Pyrotechny by Marcus Græcus, Friar Bacon, in 1270, learned that its composition was two pounds of charcoal, one of sulphur, and six of salt-petre, well pulverised and mixed. It was first made in England in the time of Elizabeth. At first it was not corned, but remained in its mealed state. was then called serpentine powder, Meyrick, v. iii. p. 71. The first bombards were made of bars of iron, strengthened with welded hoops of the

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same metal. They were short with large bores, and were made with chambers, in imitation of the tubes which ejected the Greek fire. These chambers consisted of the lower half of the cylinder, the upper being open for the admission of the can, or canister, which held the charge, from whence probably arose the term cannon. One of these may be seen in the tower of London, and there is another at Rhodes of the sixteenth century, on its original carriage, and a stone ball to fire from it. It is nineteen feet in length, two feet eight inches in diameter, its calibre two feet, and its thickness four inches. About half the length is of a less diameter, and in this, as in a chamber, was placed the powder, while the ball was in the larger part. The carriage was made of timber, placed lengthways, and cramped together. These bombards were the only kind of cannon employed in the fourteenth century, and were Grose's howitzer kind, in use before mortars. After this invention of bombs, that of carcases of different kinds soon followed. The former, according to Strada, took place in 1588. Grenades are said to have been first used in 1594 in which year the howitzer was invented by the Germans. The bomb being intended to beat down buildings in its fall, or to break and destroy every thing around it, by the pieces of broken iron scattered in all directions by its explosions, the end proposed by the carcase and grenade was to burn the town by means of fire-balls. The petard for forcing gates was invented in France, a short time before the year 1579, and soon after introduced into England.

The term bombard generally designates battering guns and mortars; but the word is also applied to lighter cannon. Accordingly Dr. Meyrick calls a cannon engraved by Strutt, a bombard on a carriage, light in proportion to the bulk of the piece. Its trail consists of a prolongation of the cascabale, which rests on the ground, a block of wood serving as a quoin for the purpose of depression. Admitting that cannon were not used in the field till the fifteenth century, this gun, for it is very small, is the kind to which Froissart alludes, when he mentions two hundred carts loaded with cannon and artillery; cannonades with bars of iron and quarrels headed with brass, and cannon mounted on walls and battlements. The balls were of stone adapted to the calibre. In 1434 it is said that the English had many kinds of projectiles, 'cannons, culverines, and other vuglaires,' more properly vulgaires, the ordinary kind. The scorpion was another sort. In an illuminated copy of the Roman de la Rose, done at the commencement of the reign of Edward IV. 1461, is the delineation of an iron cannon. The piece is placed in a kind of trough, or bed of wood, which is continued to the earth, not unlike a modern horse-artillery trail. Grose very properly says, that most of the earliest cannons were mere cylinders, fixed on sledges and being often composed of iron bars, iron plates rolled, or even jacked leather hooped, could be fired, because they were loaded by chambers fixed in at the breech. At this time they were generally purchased from abroad; and though Henry VII. and VIII. had Flemish gunners to teach the art, yet they did not VOL. III.

understand it upon mathematical principles; and in the sixteenth century the ordnance rarely made more than one discharge, the cavalry being able to charge them before they could load again. Aliens were employed in 1543 in casting great brass ordnance, though one John Owen was said to have so done in 1521. In 1626, 2 Charles I. one Arnold Rotespen had a patent for making guns in a manner before unknown in this kingdom.

Culverines were an early denomination of a species of large cannon; and when the distinction between battering-pieces (all above twelve pounders) and field-pieces commenced, according to Dr. Meyrick, temp. Henry VIII. the appellations were numerous. These names were derived from the tubes which had been used to eject the Greek fire, being fashioned so as to represent the mouths of monsters. The basilisk, the largest, shot stones of 200 pounds weight. It was so denominated from a basilisk sculptured upon it. The shot in this reign consisted of iron, lead, and stone balls; and ladles and sponges were used. Different proportions were given by various nations to pieces of the same denomination; but the following table of Ordnance in the reign of Elizabeth, applies in the main to the times immediately preceding:

The change introduced in the military art by the modern artillery, Dr. Smith observes, has enhanced greatly both the expense of exercising and disciplining any particular number of soldiers in time of peace, and that of employing them in time of war. Both their arms and ammunition are become more expensive. A musket is a more expensive machine than a javelin or a bow and arrows; a cannon or a mortar than a balista or a catapulta. The powder which is spent in a modern review, is lost irrecoverably, and occasions a very considerable expense. The javelins and arrows which were thrown or shot in an ancient one, could easily be picked up again, and were besides of very little value. The can

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