went to the bottom, with her commander and six
hundred men. The hand guns were used with a
matchlock till the pyrites wheel lock was invented.
Then came the firelock, a Dutch invention,
which was not generally adopted in this
country till Dutch William was on the throne,
in about the year seventeen hundred and ninety-
two.

That is enough to say in this place of the
early history of guns. We go back to the art of
war, which was revived especially by Prince
Maurice of Nassau. When heading a people
fighting for liberty, opposed to the best
generals in Europe, he so disciplined and
exercised his troops, that his camp was visited by
men from all Protestant countries as the best
known military school. Danes, Swedes,
Protestant Frenchmen and Germans, Englishmen,
and Scotchmen, were apprenticed to arms in the
camp of Maurice; while the German Catholics,
Italians, Sicilians, Poles, and Spaniards went to
the Low Countries for the same purpose, and
were taught in the camp of his adversary, the
Marquis Spinola.

Then there was Gustavus Adolphus, who
made for himself a scientific name in war. He
perfected the spirit of subordination, increased
the proportion of fire-arms, used lighter muskets,
diminished the depth of the ranks, relieved the
pikemen of their cuirass, and was the first man
who put his soldiers in uniform.

Fire-arms now required supplies of ammunition.
If a general could feed an army on the
enemy, he could not raise powder and shot out
of the soil. The necessity for preserving what
is called a base of operations: that is to say, for
keeping up a way of free access for supplies:
now therefore becomes imperative, and adds to
the demand for careful strategy. Gustavus was
the first general who thoroughly appreciated
this.

Battles, at the beginning of the sixteenth
century, were usually fought as incidents in
sieges, as accidents, as wilful challenges of
strength; they were not critical and decisive
parts of one great scheme of war. Turenne
and Condé were the first to see that the taking
and defending of fortresses may form but a
secondary object in war, and that battles may
be fought for greater ends. From their time,
this knowledge advanced. Wellington and
Blucher marched from Waterloo to Paris,
indifferent to seventy-five fortresses that lay about
their path, and unimpeded by them.

Again, cavalry had not been understood; they
had been cumbered with fire-arms, and employed
upon work proper for infantry. At Sintzheim
we find Turenne using an oblique order of
battle, placing platoons of musketeers between
his squadrons, and ordering his cavalry to use
only their swords.

The next pair of great scientific soldiers are
Eugene and Marlborough, whom we find
engaged in the war of the Spanish succession. In
the battle of Blenheim, the capital errors of
Marshal Tallard, the defeated general, against
whom the best skill was brought, are said to
have been no less than twelve; and Villeroi, at
Ramilies, is said to have committed five blunders,
any one of which was enough to secure
his own defeat.

Then there is Eugene's famous flank march
for the relief of Turin, when the French
besieged it with a host of eighty thousand men.

Charles the Twelfth of Sweden may have had
more courage than skill. He is said to have
neglected his base of operations. He was
ruined, also, by a battle that he was not
compelled to fight, and which it hardly would have
been a gain to win.

At the beginning of the last century, musket
and pike were blended in the bayonet: the
effective force of infantry was thus greatly
strengthened, while it was made much easier to
handle.

Cavalry, in the first campaigns of the time of
Louis the Fourteenth, approached the enemy,
fired carbines, wheeled and returned to reload,
or, if they charged sword in hand, it was at a
trot with long intervals between the squadrons.
Frederick the Great saw the strength of a shock
of cavalry in close and heavy column hurled at
full gallop against the hostile rank. The utmost
use was made of the horse power, and then the
horsemen in close conflict fought at an advantage
with their swords. This implied, however,
an exposure of the cavalry, which led
Frederick to introduce the use of horse artillery.
Of that arm, therefore, he is the founder. In
his time, also, the invention of the iron ramrod
by the Prince of Dessau, trifling matter as it
seems, doubled the value of the fire of
infantry.

In the days of Louis the Fourteenth, Vauban
commenced his career as a lieutenant of infantry.
He lived to be present at fifty-three sieges, and
one hundred and forty well-contested actions.
He remodelled more than three hundred ancient
citadels, and built more than thirty fortresses.
His is the first great name in the modern history
of fortification, and his skill was especially
remarkable in the employment of all natural aids
towards the strength of the defences planned by
him. At the siege of Namur, he was opposed by
the Dutch Engineer Cohorn, whose name is borne
by the mortars he invented.

Marshal Saxe entered the French service in
seventeen twenty-two. He fought and won
three battles, and he was the man who
introduced the use of a regular cadence in marching.

To return to Frederick the Great. He won
the battle of Leuthen by use of an oblique order
of battle, artfully devised, and, indeed, practised
a year before at Potsdam. The battle is said to
begin a new epoch in military science, and has
caused the theory of the oblique order to be
ascribed to Frederick. Until that time it had
been understood imperfectly; after that time, it
was for years the basis upon which every plan
of a battle fought in Germany was formed.

We have to pause next at the name of
Washington. One of the chief gains to the art of
war, secured by the struggle in America, was a
perception of the use of riflemen, who afterwards