The daily morning journal and courier., 1900-04-09

l CoOIlHB becomes SOllQ, compact mass, | now known as lyddite The inner lin ing of the shell is coated with clean ] tin, a precaution rendered necessary by | experience and knowledge of the
 properties of picric acid. This body
 combines with oxides to form picrates,
 which are able to bring about it's de- | tonation and hence, if ordinary iron
 shells were used any rust in the in terior (which is oxide of from would l thus tend to produce premature explo- l sion, and render the shell dangerous to l handle. The detonating charge con- sists of small quantity of lead picrate, l which is placed in the shell immediate | ly before firing, and which on impact
 charge into action"
 The following Is part of a letter ap- , bearing in the Volksstem, in which a
 Boer, named One Preller, writing from
 Gen. Botha's laager outside Ladysmith, gives an account of the effect of lyddite shells. The letter is written to F. J. Xieljhnaus, minister of mines in Pre- toria.
 we are told by those who called themselves our friends how unwiSe it would be for us to attempt to measure our strength against that of England, and were informed that the rocks be- hind which in our wars we had taken shelter, would not serve us In this case, for the agencies which were to be em- ployed would shower down upon us hellish rain of devastating material which would scatter our rocky shelter 1ynn n1,o hnfn .ryt,, dreds of square yards around the spot where one of these death dealing in- struments fell nothing was to escape with life, the terrible lyddite was to perform with certainty such as had never before been known in its mur- derous work. And all these terrors, which had been so assduously prepar- ing us for past years, have, after all, not proved as terrible as we were led to expect. Our surprise on being asked by the prisoners whom we had captured from the English, What ef- feet had the lyddte shells when they burst?' cannot be described in words We had found dum-dum bullets on the battlefield, but that lyddite had been use we had never dreamed On more
  ever, that there was something strange in connection with the greenish yellow column of smoke which arose wherever the bombs fell and at once rose the cry,
 take care, there is death in that smoke, poison, there must be- or other wise it were impossible for death to be spread for space of 400 yards around And such destruction must take place, because the English themselves had said so.'
 We had been convinced. It was lyddlte. It so happened that we had an opportunity seeingfor ourselves the opportunity of seeing for ourselves the effect lyddite, and that we were able to form some conception of the conse- quences of inhaling the deadly fumes. We were standing close to one of our Long Toms, which was attracting the fire of the enemy as tlse magnet at tracts steel; it rained heavy and fast around us from the enemys guns, when the ships cannon landed a shell close to us It made tremendous noise as it struck the ground, some distance be- hind our gun, sank about four feet in the yielding soil, and coming upon rock, burst with a most unearthly noise similar to that which Is caused by vio- lently hammering an iron building with a heavy hammer M
 Tt made a hole in the, ground big enough to bury horse in. 1t so hap pened that one of our men was at the time not more than 10 paces from the spot when the shell exploded, and loud ny eli of t1, II, the poor man, whom we should never see again, the first victim of a lyddite | bomb, The. fatal smoke cloud rose high | In the air, and the fragments of the l shell hurled through space, with n | sound in all directions Our | man stood up, walked toward the hole | which had been made by the shell and 1 stood calmly gazing down into it. As already said, we found certain portions | of these bombs, containing not only yddite, but also the chemical matter required in order to explode 1t, and I | send herewith portion in order that it may be analysed The lyddite itself l nay be seen in the possession of Dr. in the state museum.
 "The enemy used lyddite in connec-
  and these are, so we are informed ships l guns served by the sailors, and are sit lated in the hills to the north of the own and fire two kinds of shells.
 With respect to the actual working l If the bombs, I may inform you that he material in the bag marked X ap- )ears to be ignited immediately upon he projectile coming into contact with my hard substance, and this imme- liately sets fire to the lyddte. which xplodes with the effect above de- cribed. The English say that lyddite las sixteen times the explosive power of 1 dynamite, but, at the same time, it is uiescent, and will not, like dynamite xplode merely upon impact, and it annot, therefor, be fired with ordinary owder, and when it falls it bursts into fragments, which scatter on every side When the lyddite was expermented ,ith in Pretoria, the same results were l btained and we came to the conclu- ion that the projectiles were about as armless as those of the early part of l , he eighteenth century. ."-London Pail ;, Iall Gazette.