d loaded, but it will probably
be developed into something useful in time.

I have confined my remarks in the foregoing discussion principally to
such methods of using high explosives in shells as have proved
themselves successful beyond an experimental degree, and practically
they reduce themselves to two, viz., using a sluggish explosive in
small quantities from an ordinary powder gun, and using any explosive
from a pneumatic or other mechanical gun. Naturally, the success of
the latter method will soon induce the manufacture of powders having
an abnormally low maximum pressure. There is undoubtedly a field for
the use of such powders in connection with an air space in the gun to
still further regulate the pressure; but nothing of this sort has yet
been attempted. Many methods of padding the shell have been devised
for reducing the shock in powder guns, but the variability of the
powder pressure is too great to have yet rendered any such method
successful. A method was patented by Gruson in Germany of filling a
shell with the two harmless constituents of an explosive and having
them unite and explode by means of a fulminate fuse on striking an
object. He used for the constituents nitric acid and dinitro-benzine,
and was quite successful; but the system has not met with favor, on
account of the inconvenience. The explosive was about four times as
powerful as gunpowder.

That the advantage of using the most powerful explosives is a real one
can be easily shown. The eight inch pneumatic gun in New York harbor,
with a projectile containing fifty pounds of blasting gelatine and
five pounds of dynamite, easily sunk a schooner at 1,864 yards range
from the torpedo effect of the shell falling alongside it.

This same shell, if filled with gunpowder, would have contained but
twenty-five pounds, and have had but one-ninth the power.

The principal European nations are now building armored turrets sunk
in enormous masses of cement, as a result of their experiences with
gun-cotton and melenite. The fifteen inch pneumatic projectile, which
I described as being capable of sinking an armorclad at forty-seven
feet from where it struck, would have been capable of penetrating
fifty feet of cement had it struck upon a fortification. It was not
only a much larger quantity of high explosive than Europeans have
experimented with, but the explosive itself is probably more than
twice as strong as their gun-cotton and five or six times as