rifled artillery, after he had been flrst moved to
the consideration of the question, by that
feature of the battle of Inkermann, the bringing
up of the two 18-pounder guns, which, by their
superior range, effectually silenced the Russian
fire. "Sir W. Armstrong," says Sir Emerson
Tennent, "was amongst those who perceived
that another such emergency could only be met
by imparting to field-guns the accuracy and
range of the rifle; and that the impediment of
weight must be removed by substituting forged
instead of cast-iron guns. With his earliest
design for the realisation of this conception, he
waited on the Secretary for War, in 1854, to
propose the enlargement of the rifle musket to
the standard of a field-gun, and to substitute
elongated projectiles of lead instead of balls of
cast-iron. Encouraged by the Duke of
Newcastle, he put together his first wrought-iron
gun in the spring of 1855." Of this gun Sir
Emerson Tennent gives an elaborate description,
accompanied by some excellent woodcuts,
and fully discusses the advantages and
disadvantages of breech-loading, which he considers
"undoubtedly the most assailable portion of the
Armstrong system," giving the substance of the
opinions of the most profoundly scientific
engineers as his authority for arriving at that
conclusion. For the rest, the merits of the
Armstrong gun were looked upon as so great,
that the War-office authorities pronounced in
the most decided manner in its favour—the
result being expressed as follows, in the homely
but forcible language of an Edinburgh re-
viewer: "The Armstrong gun could hit a
target 2 feet 6 inches in diameter, while the
(old) service gun could not be relied upon to
hit a haystack." General Peel further
illustrated the capabilities of the Armstrong gun,
by saying, in the House of Commons, in the
session of 1859, that "its accuracy at 3000
yards was as 7 to 1 compared with that of the
common gun at 1000; whilst at 1000 yards it
would hit an object every time which was
struck by the common gun only once in fifty-
seven times; so that at equal distances the
Armstrong gun was fifty-seven times as accurate
as our ordinary artillery."

But only one side of the important question
had been fairly heard at the time when General
Peel pronounced so decisively in favour of the
Armstrong gun; nor, indeed, has a fair trial
yet been made between that weapon and the
invention of Mr. Whitworth. It was natural to
suppose that the engineer who succeeded in
manufacturing the best rifled musket, should
be considered capable of rivalling any one in
the construction of rifled artillery: the
principle having been clearly established that what
was applicable in the one case was equally
applicable in the other. Accordingly, between
the years 1854 and 1857, Mr. Whitworth was
repeatedly solicited by the Commander-in-Chief
and the Master-General of the Ordnance to
extend his attention to artillery; and brass
blocks were supplied to him from the royal
factory, adapted to different bores, which, at
the request of the government, he rifled
polygonally. All of them when tried at
Shoeburyness were reported on favourably.
Impressed by this result, but still more so by the
extraordinary performance of Mr. Whitworth's
rifle, in his gallery at Manchester, in 1856,
Lord Hardinge expressed the wish that he
should apply the same system of rifling to heavy
ordnance. This being agreed to, solid brass
blocks for three 21-pounder howitzers were sent
down to Manchester, to be bored and hexagonally
rifled. The result of the performances of these
guns when ready for trial is thus stated by Sir
Emerson Tennent: "Of these one was sent for
trial to Shoeburyness, where its performance
was at that time regarded as something remarkable.
With a charge of 2½ Ibs. of powder, and
at an elevation of 14½ deg., it sent an elongated
projectile a distance of 3240 yards. Another
was tried on April 14, 1857, in the grounds
attached to Mr. Whitworth's residence, near
Manchester; and a few weeks after the same
gun, in order to test its range, was again tried
in presence of military officers deputed by the
War Office, on the sands to the north of the
Mersey, a few miles from Liverpool. Up to
that time, according to Sir Howard Douglas,
the ordinary range of a 24-pounder, with a
charge of 8 Ibs. ofpowder, fired at an elevation
of 8 deg., was 2200 yards; Mr. Whitworth's
rifled gun, with a charge of only 2½ Ibs. of
powder, fired at an elevation of 8¼ deg., sent a
shot of 24 Ibs. to a distance of 3500 yards, being
nearly two miles."And here an incident
occurred which reminds us of Mause Headrigg's
astonishment, when, "by the help of the Lord,"
she found that, mounted on a trooper's horse,
she had leaped a wall. "This range so far
exceeded anticipation, that sufficient caution had
not been exercised in selecting a locality free
from obstruction; and the shot, after striking
the sand, ricochetted to the right of the line of
fire, and entering a marine villa north of the
village of Waterloo, it rolled upon the carpet,
fortunately doing no greater damage than
demolishing the window and astonishing a lady
who was seated near the drawing-room fire." The
third 24-pound howitzer was tried at
Portsmouth, which, loaded with a flat-headed
projectile of peculiar construction, displayed the
singular property of maintaining its direct course
under water, and penetrating eight inches of
oak three feet below the surface; an exploit
previously held (by no meaner authority than
Sir Howard Douglas) to be impossible.

Up to this period (1857), Mr. Whitworth's
inventions had received their due share of attention
from government; but in 1858 a conjuncture
arrived, the consequences of which were a
diminution of the confidence previously reposed
in his ability. At the close of the Crimean war,
an apprehension of French invasion which England
was unprepared to resist, prevailed throughout
the country. It had been excited, partly
by the Duke of Wellington's warning in his
celebrated letter to Sir J. Burgoyne, partly by the
evidence of unusual activity in the French