Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/158

on shipboard; as a defensive weapon, upon the wall of a besieged town. This iron barrel was firmly fastened down upon a horizontal bed or to a fixed framework of timber. The balls shot from it were of stone. Since there was no provision for aiming, it can be readily conceived that the enemy might be equally safe or unsafe at a variety of points in front of such an ostensible engine of destruction.

Small cannon, intended for transportation on land, were undoubtedly constructed early in the fourteenth century. They were used by the English, possibly as early as 1327, in battle with the Scotch, and certainly against the French in 1346, at the battle

"Mons Meg" Cannon at Edinburgh.

Caliber, twenty inches. Made in 1486 at Mons, Brittany. The arrangement of hoops around staves is shown at the part injured by its bursting in 1682.

of Crécy. There is nothing to indicate that on this occasion any one was killed or wounded by a cannon. The sole function was that of frightening the enemy. Nor have we any record of the method of supporting or transporting such field artillery. It was rather as heavy artillery that cannon found their chief earlier use, and they were soon made of such size as to be quite comparable in this respect with modern guns. One of these bombards, made in Belgium in 1382, weighs about sixteen tons, is more than eleven feet long, and its caliber is about two feet. It is still kept on exhibition in the city of Ghent. Another is the "Mons Meg," made in 1486 at Mons in Brittany. It was captured by the Scotch, and is now kept at Edinburgh.

A gun somewhat similar in construction to that in Ghent was dug up about forty years ago from the bed of a river in Bengal, and now stands on exhibition in the city of Moorshedabad. It was made of wrought iron, was more than twelve feet in length, and about seventeen inches in caliber. That the forging of iron on so large a scale was accomplished at such a time and in such a place indicates a marked degree of progress in metallurgy in the far East, and adds force to the thought that cannon may have been in use in Asia long before they were ever employed in Europe.

During the siege of Constantinople, in the fifteenth century, according to Gibbon, the Turks employed cannon with which stone balls, each six hundred pounds in weight, were projected, and the walls of the city were thus breached. Von Moltke mentions such a gun at the same place, twenty-eight inches in diameter at the muzzle, with which a ball more than fifteen hundred pounds in weight was projected by a charge of one hundred