The true explanation of the appearances presented in those cases which were formerly called “wind contusions,” appears to rest in the peculiar direction, the degree of obliquity, with which the missile impinges on the elastic skin, together with the situation of the structures injured beneath the surface, relatively to the weight and momentum of the ball on one side, and hard resisting substances on the other. Thus, in the case of a cannon–ball passing across the abdomen, as in two instances mentioned by Sir Gilbert Blane, where men were killed by the passage of balls across the epigastrium, the elasticity of the skin probably enabled that structure to yield to the strain to which it was exposed, while viscera were ruptured by the projectile forcing them against the vertebral column. So the weight of a ball passing obliquely over a forearm may possibly crush the bone between itself and some hard substance against which the arm may be accidentally resting, without lesion of the interposed skin. Baron Larrey, who examined many fatal cases of this kind, relates that he always found so much internal disorganization as to leave no doubt in his mind of its being the result of contact with the ball. He explained the absence of superficial lesion, by the surface having been struck by cannon–balls in the latter part of their flight, when they had undergone a change of direction from straight to curvilinear, and acquired a revolving motion, owing to atmospheric resistance and the effect of gravitation. In such a condition, he argued, they would turn round a part of the body, as a wheel passes over a limb, in place of forcing their way through it; and, while elastic structures would yield, bones and muscles, offering more opposition, would be bruised or broken. In some recently published letters on the wounded in the late campaign in Italy, by M. Appia, this writer states that wounds from massive projectiles having been rare, he had not met with an example of internal destruction of parts with skin preserved intact, and that he had nowhere seen a wound which was attributed to _vent de boulet_. The hypothesis, he remarks, seems generally abandoned. It is presumed that, in stating wounds from _gros projectiles_ to have been rare, he refers only to the wounded in the hospitals, and that it is to be inferred that the injuries from cannon–shot proved generally fatal in the field.