The architectural progeny which this style of building left in Scotland, is very different from its growth into the bastioned fortifications of other countries. The Scottish laird, or chief, when he made his house a fortress, as he had imminent necessity for doing, could not afford to erect the great flanking towers of the Normans; but he stuck little turrets on the corners of his block-house, which served his purpose admirably; and there are no better flanked fortresses, considered with a view to the form of attack to which they were subjected, than our peel-houses. On the other hand, in the Continental castles of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as Heidelberg, Perronne, and Plessis la Tour, as the old representations give it, we see the flanking system extending itself laterally, until it forms something between the Norman keep and the modern fortress. It was on Plessis that Philip de Comines moralises, as a large prison into which the great King Louis had virtually immured himself, becoming, by his own exertions for the enlargement of his power, and his protection from secret enemies, nothing better than the hapless immured prisoner, whose lot he forced upon so many others. The one great leading step which modern fortification took beyond the mere flanking system, is the discovery of the glacis for covering the stone-work, and protecting it from the attacks of cannon. The whole system, it appears, is now on trial. The charge against it is, that every addition made to it in the way of protecting works, only renders a fort the more certain of ultimate capture, since these protecting works are themselves easily taken. It is said that they save the main work from a general escalade which is never likely to be attempted, but facilitate a deliberate siege, which is the proper method of taking fortified places. It is said that in fortification we must, as in other matters of war, recur to the first principle, that the best way to protect ourselves is to kill our enemy. Of old, the main defences of a vessel were to protect the deck by castles stem and stern from a boarding enemy; now the arrangement is directed to the destruction of the enemy before he can board. Our old knights in armour were a sort of moving fortresses made more for protection than destruction. In Italy, the steel encasement was brought to such perfection, that at the battle of Tornoue, under Charles VIII., we are told by Father Daniel that a number of Italian knights were overthrown, but could not be killed until the country people brought huge stones and sledge-hammers and broke their shells, like those of so many lobsters. It sounds like an odd accompaniment of civilisation that she should make the external form of warfare more destructive and less defensive—but so it is; and a reform in fortification is proposed, which, by the abandonment of the flanking system, and something like a restoration of the primitive form, is to