large guns which require a slowly burning powder. You must understand that I am using the words quick and slow in a comparative sense only. The actual time required is always small. In the biggest gun loaded with the coarsest powder the time of the burning of the charge would be something of the nature of one twenty-fifth of a second.
But that which caused the discovery of these gelatinized powders to revolutionize tactics both by land and sea was the fact that they were smokeless. In gunpowder there is much that takes no part in the combustion, and is expelled as fine dust. It is this which causes the smoke which always accompanies the use of gunpowder, and which not only fouls the gun but in olden times must have made aiming an impossibility after the first volley in continued firing. The great feat of Admiral de Saumarez, the local hero of Guernsey, was that he drove his frigate by night between two French Men-of-War that were lying parallel to one another, and fired simultaneously both his broadsides at 22
