s and fortifications, and so thickened as to resist shot and
shell. The very title of this book marks the progress in the history of
war. Hereafter ordnance and armor are two correlatives, never to be
considered apart. The progress in offensive and defensive improvements
keeps the balance of fighting humanity pretty nearly even thus far; as
in the development of a young lobster the claws and cuirass grow
simultaneously.

Will ships or guns prove the stronger at last? No one can foresee. A
single fifteen-inch ball from the Monitor Weehawken disabled the
iron-clad Atlanta at three hundred yards, where eleven-inch balls had
fallen powerless from the armor. A similar missile shattered the sides
of the Tennessee, penetrating five inches of iron and two feet of oak,
against which all other shot had failed. What can resist such balls? A
mere pile of sand can resist them, if there are spades enough to carve
it into a fort; but as sand cannot be carved into a ship, we must resort
to new devices there. The larger the ship, the greater the danger; so
suppose we try making it smaller. Let us concentrate our ordnance and
our armor: put thicker plating on our Monitor of eight hundred tons than
the Warrior of six thousand can support, and place near the centre of
motion of the little vessel two heavier guns than the weighty one can
carry in broadside out upon her capacious ribs. This game of giants is
growing formidable; and with such a concentration of skill and power,
the fate of nations may be determined by a single blow.

Other novel questions come up, as we carry our researches farther. Try
your strength by throwing a small cannon-ball at a thin board-partition;
you will find that the missile will split or crush the board, but not
penetrate it. Fire a bullet at the same target, and it will penetrate,
but neither crush nor split. Balance a plank on its edge, so that a
pistol-ball thrown from the hand will knock it down; you may yet riddle
it through and through by the same balls from a revolver, and leave it
standing. Bring this commonplace fact to bear upon the question, how to
destroy an iron-clad; shall we destroy it by punching holes through it,
or by splitting and crushing? It is a difficult problem, and many pages
of Mr. Holley's book are devoted to the discussion of the light-shot and
the heavy-shot systems.

For these problems, and such as these, we need a new military
literature, embodying the vast results which a few y