There were two ways, in early times, of firing a volley of small shot at troops. The first consisted in mounting a number of small bombards on one carriage and firing them all, or a certain number of them, together. Gattaro speaks of 144 bombards mounted on the same bed, and so arranged as to fire thirty-six at a time.[537] The whole apparatus was called a _ribaudequin_, _barricade_, _orgue_, _orgelgeschütz_, &c.; the two latter names being given to it because it resembled “organ-pipes placed upon a broad carriage.”[538] By the second method the bullets required for the volley were put for convenience in a cartridge case or canister, and fired from a large bombard. The bullets, according to General Köhler, were simply pebbles of flint.[539] During the Indian Mutiny, I forget where, a volley of “Pyramid” or “Pool” balls was fired by the mutineers from a clubhouse upon our storming party with deadly effect. Essenwein gives plates of an orgue, dated 1390-1400, and of a gun firing case dated 1410.[540] Case was used at the siege of Belgrade, 1439,[541] and at the siege of Scutari, 1478.[542] Orgues were used as late as the Great Rebellion. At the battle of Copredy Bridge, 1644, the Cavaliers took “two baricadoes of wood, which were drawn upon wheels, and in each seven small brass and leather cannon, charged with case.”[543] _Shrapnel._ Isolated attempts to fire shell from guns (as distinguished from howitzers and mortars) had been made from time to time in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but they proved, one and all of them, abortive. The first methodical and successful shell-fire from guns was carried on during the siege of Gibraltar, 1779-83, at the suggestion of an English Infantry officer.