+---------------+---------------------+---------------+ | | Sir | According | | | William Monson's | to some other | | Sorts | Account. | Accounts | | of +---------+-----------+---------------+ | Ordnance. | Bore. | Weight of | Weight of | | | | the Shot. | the Shot. | +---------------+---------+-----------+---------------+ | | inches. | lbs. | lbs. | | Cannon | 8 | 60 | 60 or 63 | | Demi-Cannon | 6-3/4 | 33-1/2 | 31 | | Cannon Petro | 6 | 24-1/2 | 24 | | Culverin | 5-1/2 | 17-1/2 | 18 | | Demi-Culverin | 4 | 9-1/2 | 9 | | Falcon | 2-1/2 | 2 | 2 | | Falconet | 2 | 1-1/2 | ... | | Minion | 3-1/2 | 4 | 4 | | Sacar | 3-1/2 | 5-1/2 | 5 | | Rabinet | 1 | 1/2 | ... | +---------------+---------+-----------+---------------+ The quality of these guns was good. Down to the middle of the sixteenth century they were made by welding together bars of wrought iron little inferior in tensile strength to that used in very recent times for Armstrong guns. About 1550 the use of cast iron, which made it possible to turn out large numbers of guns, came in. All the changes which have taken place in the construction of weapons of war have not been in the direction of what we should consider progress. When in our own time the guns which had been sunk at Spithead, in the wreck of the =Mary Rose=, were dredged up, it was found that they were breech-loaders, and there is evidence that experiments in the rifling of cannon were made very early. The difficulty of making a trustworthy breech-piece accounts for the triumph of the muzzle-loader, which drove its rival out of the field for centuries. The distribution of the guns in the ships remained very much what it had been during the reign of Henry VIII.; that is to say, cannon of the most various sizes were mounted side by side on the same deck. A few specimens taken from a list attested by the auditors of the Prest and the officers of the Ordnance in 1599, printed by Derrick, will show how far this practice was carried.