through the open port of the ship, to their appointed place in the hold. The chief factory of the laboratory department is the great sight of the Arsenal, as here the visitor witnesses twenty or thirty most curious operations, the more important only of which he can stop to examine amid the whirlwind of machinery that everywhere meets his sight and vibrates on his ear. The manufacture of elongated bullets for the rifles affords perhaps the most startling novelty of all. The rifle itself is not a greater advance upon old Brown Bess than is the Minié bullet upon the old one-ounce ball. The apparatus now employed to produce it contrasts as forcibly with the simple bullet-mould formerly in use. Instead of heating the lead to a fluid state, it is simply warmed, in which condition it is subjected to hydraulic pressure in a large iron vessel, which has but one small aperture at the top, of the size of the intended elongated bullet. Out of this hole the metal is driven in the form of a continuous rod of lead, which, as it issues forth, rolls itself upon iron reels as though it were so much cotton! The reels are then attached to a machine which draws the metal between its teeth, bites it off to the required size, moulds the cone, depresses the cup, and condenses the mass at the same moment. These wonderful bullet-makers, when in full work, turn out five hundred elongated bullets a minute, or upwards of a quarter of a million daily. To complete the missile, the cup has to be filled with a boxwood plug to ensure its proper expansion whilst in the act of leaving the gun. Here again a partially self-acting apparatus is called into play, one lad being sufficient to feed several machines with square rods of wood, the ends of which are embraced by a circular hollow cutter, which instantly reduces them to the right conical form, and then cuts them off. These little plugs are produced at the same rate as the bullets.