The common tradition of Bartholdus Schwartz having invented Gunpowder and Artillery, about 1320, is without the slightest foundation, but he might possibly have suggested the simplest application of it to warlike purposes, in consequence of some accidental explosion while mixing the ingredients in a mortar. Indeed, the name, as well as the form of the old species of artillery, which was employed to throw large bullets at an elevation, strongly corroborate this conjecture; but Schwartz cannot lay any claim to originality of invention. ~Powder made in the reign of Richard II. 1378.~ Gunpowder was made in England in the fourteenth century, as Richard II. commissioned Sir Thomas Norwich to buy, in London, or in any other place, certain quantities of “sulphur, saltpetre, and charcoal,” for making Gunpowder. ~Tartaglia on Powder, A. D. 1500.~ Tartaglia, at the commencement of the sixteenth century, sets down twenty-three different compositions, made use of at different times, the first of which, being the most ancient, consists of equal parts of nitre, sulphur, and charcoal. ~Ancient gunpowder weak.~ Gunpowder, for some time after the invention of artillery, was of a composition much weaker than what we now use, or than that ancient one mentioned by Marcus Græcus; but this, it is presumed, was owing to the weakness of their first pieces, rather than to the ignorance of a better mixture. ~Graining.~ The change of the proportion of the materials composing it was not the only improvement it received. The invention of graining it is doubtless a considerable advantage to it; for powder, at first, was always in the form of fine meal, such as it was reduced to by grinding the materials together. It is doubtful whether the first graining of powder was intended to increase its strength, or only to render it more convenient for the filling into small charges, and the charging of small arms, to which alone it was applied for many years, whilst meal-powder was still made use of in cannon. But at last the additional strength which the grained powder was found to acquire from the free passage of the fire between the grains, occasioned the meal-powder to be entirely laid aside. ~Tartaglia wrote, 1537.~ ~William Bourne, 1577.~ That powder was first used in meal, and continued in its old form for cannon long after the invention of graining it for small arms, are facts not to be contested. Tartaglia expressly asserts that in his time cannon-powder was in meal, and the musket-powder grained. And our countryman, William Bourne, in his “Art of Shooting in great Ordnaunce,” published forty years after Tartaglia, tells us, in chap. I, that serpentine powder, (which he opposes to corn, or grained-powder) should be as fine as sand, and as soft as flour: and in his third chapter he says that two pounds of corn-powder will go as far as three pounds of serpentine-powder. ~Tartaglia on the proportions.~