The Press.
London, England, 1857-12-12 00:00:00

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED-DECEMBER 3.

BOOKS.
The Three Clerks. By Anthony Trollope. Three Vols.
Bentley.
The Bentley Ballads. Edited by Pr. Doran. lteniley.
The lngoldsby Legends. By Thomas Ingoldsby, Esq.
Bentley.
The Great Day of Atonement. Edited by Mrs. Cohn Mac-
kenzie. Bentley.
The Sepoy Revolt. By Henry Mead. Murray.
Orphans. By the Author of " Margaret Maitland," &c.
Hurst and ltlackett.
The White House by the Sea. By M. Betlam Edwards.
Two Vols. Smith and Elder.
The Gloaming of Life. By the Rey. Alexander Wallace.
My Feathered Friends. By the Rev. J. G. Wood, M.A.,
F.L.S. Routledge..
Pastoral Poems. By William Wordsworth. Sampson Low.
The Indian Crisis. By the Rev. Frederick D. Maurice
' M.A. Macmillan and Co.
The Year Nine. By the Author of" Mary Powell."
Virtue and Hall.

Landmarks of History. Mozley.
The Young Exiles. By Anne Bowman. Routledge.
Corona, and other Poems. By E. J. Reed. Longman*.
sporting Scenes conon#st the Kaffirs of South Africa. By
Captain A. W. Drayson. Routledge.
Lodge's Peerage of the British Empire for 1458.
Hurst and Blaekett.

uni! kttarket Lane ditg

FRIDAY EVENING.
Tnr: return of the Bank of England for the week
ending Wednesday last, the 9th inst., shows the
following changes compared with that for the week
prece. I in g :
Decrease in Circulation
Increase in Public Deposits
Increase in Other Deposits 4,538
Decrease in Government Securities 7,625
Increase in Other Securities
Increase in Bullion 713,0'22
Increase in Rest
Increase in Reserve 1,672,682
Bullion in both Departments
Circulation, including Bank Post
Bills
This comparison is satisfactory. The position of
the Bank is much stronger, both in respect to the
Bullion and the Reserve ; while the Private Securi-
ties have undergone an important diminution. The
Private Deposits, however, show a small increase,
and now amount to nearly fourteen millions and
a half.
Three heavy failures were reported to day, and
there was a rumour of a joint•stock bank in one of
the midland counties being in difficulties.
The monthly account of the Bank of France, made
up to yesterday, was published in the Moniteur of this
morning. It is generally favourable. The bullion
has increased by no less than 1,860,8041., and it now

[Advert,sement.)
MONSTER GUNS.
TO THE EDITOR OF " THE PRESS."
Sir,—ln your impression of the 21st instant (p. 1135),
I find a letter from Captain Blakely, R.A., which obliges
me once more, and I trust for the last time, to intrude

upon your space.
First, however, let me reassert that your notices of the
large mortars, in your papers of the 24th and 31st, ult., did
call for all I have said of them in my letter published by
you on the 14th instant. First you told the world " they
were the patented invention of Captain Blakely "—then
ycu correct the " great injustice" you did to Dr. Harte by
stating " they were not the sole invention of Captain
Blakely "—but when did you even hint at correcting the
injustice you had done to me, the only person of all those
named to whom a real injustice had been done, by thus
putting forward two persons as the designers of that which
I alone desigced, neither of whom had anything whatever
to do with the matter, while the part you were pleased to
assign to me was that of "obtaining my information " from
another and using it to obtain 10,0001. from Government,
sic., and while your own footnote (p. 1100) to my letter
actually reiterates the misstatement (it appears now upon
Captain Blakely's authority) "that Dr. Harte and Mr.
Mallet were the designers " ? You have been led astray by
erroneous information, and 1 now begin to understand
why and bow.
Now, sir, l repeat that Captain Blakely or his alleged
discoveries, his patented or other inventions, have had no
connection with my design of the three-foot mortars now
at Woolwich. Until within three months, I had. never
heard of that gentleman, his discoveries or his inventions.
His discovery, as to the priority of which he is anxious,
namely, his mathematical investigation of the strains upon
cannon made in concentric rings, is a question between
himselfand Dr. Harte, in which I believe the latter has the
claim to priority; but I had anticipated both as to the
method of construction, of which those mathematical in.
vestigations are only the expression of the abstract laws,
and these certainly correctly first given by Dr. Harte.
- -

- -
Captain Blakely's inventions, I suppose, are comprised
in his patent of -August, 1855, the main drift of which
(omitting some subordinate and impracticable projects
also specified) is to cast cannon of cast iron, and then
hoop them with one or more layers of wrought-iron rings.
As to the novelty of this invention, he tells you Lord Pan-
inure informed him it had been proposed in 1807, and I
can now inform him that the whole scheme of cast-iron
interior and wrought-iron hoops was proposed, and pub-
lished with plates. by Captain fhiery, of the French Artil-
lery, in 1840, in his large work, " Applications du Fer aux
Constructions de l'Artilleiie." It is needless to say any-
thing as to the value of a patent for an invention fifteen
years before the world at the very least, if not forty-eight.
lam wrong, however. The patent does not embrace
all Captain lilakely's inventions. He gives us another.
It was to strengthen all the old Turkish kamerlicks of the
Dardanelles and the 10-inch naval shell guns by lapping
them round with wire or wire rope. This he says was
" a practical proposal." The select committee, it appears,
thought it "impracticable and dangerous," and their judg-
ment in this instance I can, as a practical engineer
(conversant with such matters for some twenty years),
most fully endorse. However, this " wire-gun" project,
too, is unhappily an old invention, having been proposed
and tried rather more than one hundred years ago.
Now, sir, give me leave to ask Captain Blakely what
earthly connection have these " mathematics" or " inven-
tions" of his to do with my three-foot mortars, or upon
what just pretence does he hook his name into contact
with them, and expatiate dolorously upon the ill-success of
his erode projects as contrasted with my results accom-
plished, as though he was an ill-used man who had had
his share in them overlooked and unrewarded?
The quotations from my work (pp. 148, 152) made by
Captain Blakely have no bearing upon the matter in hand.
They apply to the construction of certain sizes of cannon,
not to mortars; and the application made of these passages
to try to contradict my statement that " the three-foot
mortars had been carried to completion without alteration
in any essential principle" is based upon this mistake,
while the assertion that "longitudinal bars (or bolts) in
the inside were certainly part of the original plan" is a
gratuitous misstatement. The remainder of Captain
lilakely's letter I may pass as irrelevant ; he may have
made the most wonderful nine-pounder that ever astonished
Woolwich with its pop, but what have I to do with it, cr it
with three-foot mortars, unless the proverb be apropos
" That people sometimes strive to catch at the tails of a
flying kite "?
Finally,l would just hint to Captain Blakely that our
respective " backing up " by the authorities appears

71,9d:1,000 lirs