The first, so far as is known, who urged the adjustment of fuzes was Sebastian Hälle,[622] in 1596, and he fared as fare most of those who see further than their fellows. The many failed to see the object which he saw clearly; therefore (they said) the object did not exist, and he was a dreamer. A century after his death, however, gunners began to discover that his dreams were substantial enough; and in 1682 Zeug-Lieut. Buchner dilates upon the advantages of a fuze that will burn _ein gewiss Tempo_[623]—a certain time. The mere fact that there were at least three different kinds of fuze in use towards the close of the seventeenth century—paper, wood, and iron[624]—proves that the search for a serviceable fuze was going actively forward. The excellent plates given by Buchner and Mieth show clearly that their fuzes were bored. In both cases the rate of burning was tested with difficulty, owing to the want of a practical timekeeper. Buchner recommends the use of a pendulum, or very careful beating time (or counting);[625] Mieth alludes to the pendulum, but evidently put little trust in it, for he adds, “The correct time can be only found by trial shell.”[626] By the middle of the eighteenth century we had beechwood fuzes, which were cut. The rate of burning was determined “by burning two or three, and making use of a watch or string by way of pendulum.”[627] It was observed about this period that when fuzes were cut very short, either the flame failed to reach the bursting charge and the shell went blind, or the thin disc of fuze composition set back into the shell from the shock of the discharge and the shell burst in the bore. To obviate this Muller proposed to provide special fuzes, with a quicker-burning composition than usual, for use at short ranges.[628] This plan was temporarily adopted, for we find that there were three different fuzes in our service in 1779, one that burned an inch in 5 seconds, a second that burned an inch in 4.5 seconds, and a third that burned an inch in 4 seconds. It is evident, however, from a remark made by the Inspector of the Royal Military Academy, Captain George Smith, R.A., in his “Universal Military Dictionary” (from which these details have been taken) that the standard of shell fire in the year 1779 was a low one. “When the distance of the battery from the object is known, the time of the shell’s flight may be computed to a second or two.” Extreme regularity of burning, then, was not expected: an error of “a second or two” in the time of flight was of trivial importance. But an event happened in Gibraltar in this very year which suddenly raised the standard to a height that no one could have foreseen—the adoption of Captain Mercier’s method of shell-fire from guns, with short fuzes. This system ended with the siege; it was never resorted to, probably, outside the gates of Gibraltar; and, more probably still, when the siege was over things fell gradually back into the unruffled quiet of routine.