BLONDEL, who had been the proposer, and who more particularly had studied the question, composed a large volume on the subject, which he published a few years after[10], under the title of _L’Art de jetter les Bombes_; a performance much celebrated at the time, and that continued in no small request long after, as containing, besides his own, the labours of several other members of that society of the most distinguished merit. So many, and such hands concurring in framing this work, it was no wonder that the learned throughout Europe were confirmed by it in the Galilean theory; and the more as M. BLONDEL had obviated the only objection they supposed could be made to it, the _resistance of the air_, which he had taken care expressly to mention, and so to combat as to persuade the reader, that the retardation arising from that cause was so inconsiderable as to be of no account in the practice. This illusion about the small or non-resistance of the air to bodies rapidly moving in it, was so prevalent at the end of the last century, and in the beginning of the present, that in the history of the Royal Academy for the year 1707, we find their worthy and most accomplished secretary, after taking notice of the joint labours of so many able mathematicians concerned in BLONDEL’s publication, venturing to say, _it did not appear that any thing was then wanting for the practice of the art_ [of Gunnery] _except perhaps perfecting the instruments for pointing a cannon or mortar ... but that geometry had done its part, so to speak, with regard to practice_. &c.[11] But far be it from our intention to relate the imperfections of others, in order to raise ourselves by the comparison. Candour requires of us not only to acknowledge, that in this country, as to the point in question, we did not surpass our neighbours; but ingenuously to own that, on the contrary, we were perhaps more liable to exception. For, some years before BLONDEL’s work appeared[12], a treatise was published by one of our own artillerists, ANDERSON (a person of eminence in his profession) intituled _The genuine use and effects of the gun_, in which the author strenuously supports the Galilean theory; nor do we learn he was ever contradicted among us, although he undertook to answer all those who should make objections to it. Nay, when he had an opportunity afterwards of making experiments on the ranges of bombs, and by those trials was assured that their flight was not in a parabola; yet so far was he from ascribing the deviation from that figure to the resistance of the air, that he had recourse to an hypothesis, repugnant to all the laws of motion, to salve appearances, and to reconcile those experiments with his former doctrine[13].