a revolving motion at right angles to the line of flight, and making
it an "arm of precision." But pre-historic artillery we may dismiss
or leave to Milton. The blind bard omits to inform us whether the
guns used in the great pounding-match between Lucifer and Michael
were smooth-bores or rifles. The strong presumption is that they were
exclusively the former, and that a well-served battery of Parrotts
would have silenced them in fifteen minutes. By giving him a few
pieces of the kind the poet would have further brightened the feather
he sets in Satan's cap as the benefactor of mankind by inventing
gunpowder and shortening wars. The bow he presents to us as an old and
familiar weapon even at the date of that first and greatest of
pitched battles. Its claim, as the parent of projectile implements,
is recognized in the common etymology of _arcus, arcualia_--artillery.
Arblast, arquebuse, blunderbuss, mark a humbler collateral descent
in the same verbal family. The ballista, or fifty-man-power bow,
constituted the heavy, and the individual article the light, artillery
of twenty centuries ago. Slings and javelins, being for hand-to-hand
fighting (David was near enough to hold an easy conversation with
Goliath before bringing him down), can hardly be brought within
the designation. The twang of either heavy or light was but a thin
contribution to the orchestra of battle compared to "the diapason of
the cannonade." How much we have lost in the absence of this element
of tremendous noise from the conflicts of ancient days! What a tool
it would have been in Homer's hands! How trivial, to the author of
the book of Job, would have seemed the noise of the captains and
the shouting! We cannot, indeed, quite suppress the fancy that some
mightier counter-concussion must have filled the air at Thrasimene,
when "an earthquake reeled unheededly away:" _Nemo pugnantium
senserit_, avers Livy. But nothing is said of it. The old heroes died
in silence, like the wolf "biting hard among the dying dogs."