Saltpetre. Charcoal. Sulphur. 69.0 16.5 14.5 for big guns; 72.4 14.5 13.1 for small guns; 75.7 13.0 11.3 for small arms.” The information given to us about granulation by the early English gunners is neither clear nor full. When Whitehorne tells us that the method of corning “all sorts of powder” was the same, namely, by means of a sieve and a few heavy metal balls,[470] what meaning did he intend to convey by the phrase “all sorts of powder”? There can be little doubt that he meant “powders of whatever composition, and whatever the size of the grain to be produced;” first, because it would be preposterous to assume that all the sieves of his time had meshes of equal size; and secondly, because there is abundant evidence to show that, long after Whitehorne’s time, the powders for different guns in England (and elsewhere) varied both in composition and grain. In 1620 Thybovril and Hanzelet tell us that powder to be granulated is to be passed through a sieve with holes “de la grosseur que vous desirez votre poudre”;[471] and eight years afterwards Norton uses the very same ambiguous phrase, “a syve ... made full of holes of the bignesse you desire your cornes.”[472] Did they mean that the size of the grain in their time was purely arbitrary and might be of any magnitude whatever? A passage in Boillot’s (earlier) work explains their meaning much better than they have done it themselves. He first tells us that the sieve is to have holes “de telle grosseur que vous voudrez,” and he then goes on to explain the proper size of grain for use in the different classes of ordnance, as given here on a previous page. In a word, three or four kinds of sieves (differing in the size of their meshes) were procurable—some for graining powder for big guns, others for graining powder for medium guns, &c. &c.—and having fixed upon the gun from which your powder (when grained) was to be fired (and consequently upon the size of the grain), you were to select those sieves which had meshes “of the bignesse you desired your cornes.” From the phrase used above by Norton, it is certain that several powders, differing in grain, were in use when he wrote; from the evidence of Norton,[473] Nye,[474] and others, it is equally certain that several different receipts for making powder were in use during their time. The conclusion is that during the first half of the seventeenth century powders made in England for different guns varied both in composition and size of grain. The lawlessness in composition and grain during the greater part of the Transition Period was the natural consequence of the absence of any instrument to measure the comparative strength of different powders, and enable gunners to establish some standard for the proportions of the ingredients and the size of the grain.