which they traverse rivers, everything necessary to them, and all that enters into the form of a train of Artillery. The same word, still further extended in its meaning, likewise comprehends the men destined for the service of the Artillery; the people who provide the Artillery with materials and implements when engaged; the cannoniers, the bombardiers, the officers of every rank, and engineers of every kind. By Artillery is likewise understood the science which the officers of Artillery ought to possess. In the most ancient times, when war was made with quickness and impetuosity, the use of Artillery was unknown. Something like military engines seem hinted at in the book of Deuteronomy, "Thou shalt build bulwarks against the city that maketh war with thee, until it be subdued." But the earliest precise mention of Artillery is in the second book of Chronicles, where we are told, that Uzziah, who began his reign eight hundred and nine years before the Christian "made in Jerusalem engines invented by cunning men, to be upon the towers and upon the bulwarks, to shoot arrows and great stones withal." This also is particularly mentioned by Josephus who represents Uzziah's care of Jerusalem as towards the end of his reign. era, The Greeks, who were desirous of appropriating to themselves every improvement of science they gathered from the east, would fain have been believed the inventors of Artillery. But so far from being in possession of Artillery, they had not in their early times, if we may judge from Homer's writings, one military engine i 2 Deut xx 20. k 2 Chron. xxvi. 15. that was calculated to shake a wall. The earliest in profane history is probably to be sought for in the siege of Motya, about three hundred and seventy years before Christ, where Dionysius, having battered the fortifications with his rams, advanced to the walls towers rolled upon wheels, whence he galled the besieged with continued vollies of arrows and stones thrown from his catapults. The next memorable instance that occurs is the siege of Rhodes by Demetrius Poliorcetes, where even Grecian ingenuity was exhausted in the invention and improvement of Artillery. Another instance of notoriety occurs when Hannibal besieged Saguntum, two hundred and nineteen years before the Christian era; and the Saguntines hindered his soldiers from using the battering-ram, by an incessant hurling of darts, stones, and other missile weapons. See the account in Livy," who has also supplied us, with a curious inventory of the warlike engines which Scipio, eight years afterwards, found among the stores of Carthagena. There were no less than a hundred and twenty catapults of the larger size, two hundred and eighty-one of the smaller; of the greater balistæ twenty-three, of the lesser fifty-two; besides an innumerable quantity of scorpions of different sizes, arms, and missile weapons. Two years, however, previous to this, Marcellus had laid siege to Syracuse, a city proverbially fatal to the arms that attacked it. Archimedes was at that time resident in Syracuse; and at the earnest solicitation of Hiero, king of Sicily, exerted 1 Anc. Univ. Hist vol. vi. p. 401. m Diod. Siculus, 1. 20. . 1. 26. ch. xlvi. 47. : the powers of his mind in the invention of Artillery and other warlike engines. Marcellus had brought with him an amazing engine called sambuca, upon eight galleys which the mathematician destroyed by discharg ing single stones of enormous weight upon it, while it was a considerable distance from the walls. The chief instruments he used were balistæ, a sort of crow lowered by a lever, which, hoisting the ships of the Romans by the prow, plunged them to the bottom of the sea; grapples, and scorpions. Archimedes, however, left no account of these military engines in writing, because he considered all attention to mechanics as mean and sordid, placing his whole delight in those intellectual speculations which, without any relation to the necessities of life, have an intrinsic excellence, arising from truth and demonstration only; and reckoning such inventions but among the amusements of geometry.p The credit of introducing Artillery into our own country must undoubtedly be given to the Normans, whom William of Malmesbury describes a as having a peculiar delight in war, and assures us that they excelled in all the arts of attacking their enemies; when their forces were sufficient. The Normans first introduced among our castles the keep, placed upon a mount, whence they annoyed the surrounding enemy with their darts, stones, and other offensive weapons. Their method of attacking castles seems generally to have been by mere force; blockade was little practised; P See the Life of Marcellus in Plutarch. 91. 3. p. 57. Strutt's Manners and Customs of the English, vol. 1. p. 93. and the iron ram, which the Romans found so serviceable, was rendered in a great measure useless by the deep ditches which surrounded their fortifications. The principal machines which the Normans employed, were of course of the projectile kind; and they were not only used in regular sieges, but occasionally so contrived as to be used on ship-board.s Machines for throwing stones occur so early as in the battle of Hastings; and Robert de Brunne, in his wars against the Saracens, informs us, that when Richard the First set out against the Holy Land, he had in his barges and galleys, mills turned by the wind, which, by force of the sails, threw fire and stones. The benefit which the English manners derived from the Crusades, is a topic on which we shall not here enlarge; but the accessions to the knowledge of our ancestors in the art of war were singularly conspicuous. From the Saracens they obtained a sort of wild-fire of so subtle a composition, that there was no method of extinguishing it but by smothering it by heaps of dust or vinegar. It was by this device that the Black Prince set fire to Remorentine; and it was often thrown in pots from the catapulta. The Greek and Roman writers afford us many instances of the superior force which the catapulta and balista of the ancients could occasionally display; nor are parallel instances wanting in the annals of Britain. Camden informs us, that with the mangonels, trebuches, and briccolas, our forefathers used to cast forth millstones and Holinshed relates, that when Edward the See Matt. Paris, p. 1091. t Ibid. p. 539. First beseiged Strively Castle, he caused certain engines of wood to be raised against it, which shot off stones of two and three hundred weight. The connexion between the modern and the old Artillery need hardly be prefaced by recapitulating the discovery of gunpowder. For some time after that singular composition was applied to military purposes, the machines and pieces of ordnance were very ponderous and unwieldy, and of course unfit for expeditious service. Military people, at that time, possessed but a small share of learning of any kind, and almost none at all of a mechanical or mathematical nature. What they did in their profession was entirely the effect of practice. The form of their Artillery, as well as of the warlike engines and instruments for conducting it, was only such as the most obvious hints suggested, or the rudest and most uncultivated invention dictated. Their first pieces were not only clumsy and unmanageable, but as they succeeded to the machines of the ancients, they were employed like them in throwing stones of a prodigious weight; and, therefore, were necessarily of an huge and enormous bore, consisting usually of pieces of iron fitted together lengthways, and hooped with iron rings. Some of them were so large that they could not be fired above four or five times a day. Such were those with which Mahomet II. battered the walls of Constantinople in 1453, being some of the calibre of no less than twelve hundred pounds; and Guicciardine, in the first book of his history, informs us, that so large a portion of time intervened between the different chargings and dischargings of one of those pieces, that the besieged had sufficient time to repair at their leisure |