The Japanese are a practical people, and acknowledge their inferiority in this arm. In the Japanese army there are nineteen regiments of artillery, each under a colonel. Five of these are mountain and fourteen field, and their combined strength is one hundred and fourteen batteries of six hundred and eighty-four guns. Each battery is armed with the seven-and-a-half centimètre steel gun made at the Osaka Arsenal. Field and mountain guns are of the same calibre and take the same shell, though the difference in length, charge, and range is considerable. The tangent sight of the field gun is graduated up to 6,200 metrès, and that of the mountain gun to 4,300 metrès. The projectile of each gun weighs about eleven pounds, and the guns are not quick firers, though the recoil is reduced to a minimum by means of drag-shoes under each wheel. The time fuse in field and mountain guns can be set up to a range of 4,800 metèrs; the ammunition is not “fixed,” but the cartridges are contained in brass cases, with percussion caps in the base. So much for the gun which may be described as inferior--except as to the time and use--to the gun used by us in South Africa at the beginning of the war. The mobility of the field artillery is seriously affected by the inferior quality of the draught horses. As we saw on July 31st one division was able to bring into action only thirteen field guns, notwithstanding the use of double teams. The horses are small and badly trained, and the march of the artillery in mountainous country is slow. These defects in material are not altogether neutralised by the skill and coolness of the gunners, who handle their weapons with the utmost confidence, and are clever in selecting a target as well as in aiming and laying the guns. In the use of common shell the Japanese have departed from the usual practice of European artillery. There have, it is true, been occasions when they were forced to employ common shell instead of shrapnel, because of the limitations of the time fuse. But experience in Manchuria, as in South Africa, has shown that the effect of shrapnel is over-estimated, and that common shell with an explosive as powerful as that invented by the Japanese is often more destructive, even under conditions that would suggest shrapnel to a European gunner. At the battle of the Yalu the combination of common shell with shrapnel proved irresistible against trenches and troops scattered as well as massed. In the opinion of men qualified to pass judgment we ought to pay more attention to the use of common shell, and should add a considerable proportion of such shells to our field battery equipment. This, I believe, will now be done, seeing that a new high explosive for field use has been invented.