[Footnote IV-28: The following is a copy of the colophon: “Johannes ex verona oriundus: Nicolai cyrurgie medici filius: Artis impressorie magister: hunc de re militari librum elegantissimum: litteris et figuratis signis sua in patria primus impressit. An. MCCCCLXXII.”] [Footnote IV-29: “Valturius speaks of Pasti in one of his letters as being eminently skilful in the arts of Painting, Sculpture, and Engraving.”--Ottley, Inquiry, p. 257.] Several of those cuts occupy an entire folio page, though the greater number are of smaller size. They chiefly represent warlike engines, which display considerable mechanical skill on the part of the contriver; modes of attack and defence both by land and water, with various contrivances for passing a river which is not fordable, by means of rafts, inflated bladders, and floating bridges. In some of them inventions may be noticed which are generally ascribed to a later period: such as a boat with paddle-wheels, which are put in motion by a kind of crank; a gun with a stock, fired from the shoulder; and a bomb-shell. It has frequently been asserted that hand-guns were first introduced about the beginning of the sixteenth century, yet the figure of one in the work of Valturius makes it evident that they were known some time before. It is also likely that the drawing was made and the description written at least ten years before the book was printed. It has also been generally asserted that bomb-shells were first used by Charles VIII. of France when besieging Naples in 1495. Valturius, however, in treating of cannon, ascribes the invention to Malatesta.[IV-30] Gibbon, in chapter lxviii. of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, notices this cut of a bomb-shell. His reference is to the second edition of the work, in Italian, printed also at Verona by Bonin de Bononis in 1483, with the same cuts as the first edition in Latin.[IV-31] The two following cuts are fac-similes of the bomb-shell and the hand-gun, as represented in the edition of 1472. The figure armed with the gun,--a portion of a large cut,--is firing from a kind of floating battery; and in the original two figures armed with similar weapons are stationed immediately above him. [Footnote IV-30: “Inventum est quoque alterum machinæ hujusce tuum Sigismonde Panpulfe [Malatesta]: qua pilæ æneæ tormentarii pulveris plenæ cum fungi aridi fomite urientis emittuntur.”--We hence learn that the first bomb-shells were made of copper, and that the fuzee was a piece of a dried fungus. As the first edition has neither numerals nor signatures, I cannot refer to the page in which the above passage is to be found. It is, however, opposite to the cut in which the bomb-shell appears, and that is about the middle of the volume.]