Well had it been if the many hundred inventors in England and elsewhere had studied, and made themselves intimately acquainted with the productions there to be seen in such abundance. Monuments they are of mis-spent skill and labour; samples of the almost hopeless task of fabricating complicated machinery which shall resist the action of explosive gases at high pressure. An experiment extending over two hundred years, but unattended with success, notwithstanding all the skill and ingenuity brought to bear upon it, is, we think, sufficient to prove that breech-loading guns cannot be made sufficiently durable to yield any reasonable return for the extra expense and trouble attending their fabrication. Nevertheless, our “would-be mechanics hope against hope;” and to such we would, in conclusion, tender a word of advice. Before spending your money, make acquaintance (and an intimate one is necessary) with all that has been done before, and if in your own production you find principles which have been untouched by any previous invention, and untainted by any of the previous causes of failure, then patent your invention, and make a fortune--if you can.
Great mechanical skill, and even scientific principles, are to be found in some of the earliest productions after the invention of fire-arms; and thus is established the important fact, that want of experience was the chief drawback under which they laboured: one elaborate machine being unequal to their requirements was succeeded by another; and yet, with all these examples patent to us, we still fruitlessly fall back on exhausted principles.
A more intimate knowledge of what our predecessors have accomplished would be a great boon to our race. Foreign nations, but especially France, have provided for this by their museums; and we want here a museum of progression, an epitome of the mind of the present age, and which, continued to future generations, would leave to no man the fruitless toil of hauling in an endless rope.
Gunpowder being the base on which the superstructure of this treatise is to be raised, the history, the use, and the nature of this explosive compound, are here placed in the foreground; as it is essential to the correct conception of the various matters hereafter to be explained, that the reader be first acquainted with the one grand principle in fire-arms, the propellant power of explosion.