An explosive missile made its way through the air with little noise[6] and less light:[7] during its flight the blazing contents of the incendiary shell doubtless gave out much light and made a considerable noise, as described by many early writers. When an explosive shell reached its object there was, sooner or later (if it acted at all), an explosion, occasionally followed by a conflagration: an incendiary shell produced a conflagration only. The second difficulty arises from the change of meaning which many technical words have undergone in the lapse of years. The Arabic word _barúd_ originally meant _hail_, was afterwards applied to _saltpetre_, and finally came to signify _gunpowder_. Our own word _powder_, which at first meant a fine, floury dust (_pulvis_), is often used in the present day to designate the stringy nitrocelluloid, _cordite_—smokeless powder. The Chinese word _yo_ means _gunpowder_ now, although its first meaning was a _drug_ or _plant_. For centuries gunpowder was called _kraut_ in Germany, and to this day it is called _kruid_ in Holland. The Danish _krud_ has not long become obsolete. The present Chinese word for _firearm_, _huo p’áu_, originally meant a _machine_ for throwing blazing incendiary matter. The Arabic word _bundúq_ at first meant a _hazel-nut_, secondly a _clay-pellet_ the size of a hazel-nut, thirdly a _bullet_, and finally a _firearm_.[8] The Latin _nochus_, a _hazel-nut_, is used, strange to say, to designate a _smoke-ball_ by an old German military writer, Konrad Kyeser, whose “Bellifortis” dates from 1405.[9] The word was also applied in Germany to bullets in general, and more particularly to projectiles discharged by machines. The word _Artillery_, both in France and England, originally meant _bows and arrows_. In his original account of the battle of Cressy, Froissart calls the apparatus and bolts of the Genoese crossbowmen _leur artillerie_; while a few lines further on he speaks of the _kanons_ of the English.[10] Ascham, writing in 1571, says: “Artillerie nowadays is taken for two things: gunnes and bowes.”[11] Selden reminds us that _gonne_, our present _gun_, at first meant a _machine_ of the ballista type.[12] It is used in this sense in “Kyng Alisaunder,” 3268, written A.D. 1275-1300, and other metrical romances. Like the Arabic _bundúq_, the word is occasionally applied to the _projectile_, as in the “Avowing of Arthur,” st. 65. It is used in the modern sense, as _cannon_, in the “Vision of Piers the Plowman,” Passus xxi, C text, 293, a poem begun in 1362 and finally revised by its author in 1390; and in all three meanings by Chaucer, in poems written during the last quarter of the fourteenth century;—as a machine in the “Romaunt of the Rose,” 4176, as a projectile in the “Legende of Good Women,” 637, and as a cannon in the “Hous of Fame,” 533.