Much larger guns were constructed in times past than are being built now. In 1880 the English made guns weighing from 100 to 120 tons, from 18 to 20 inches bore and which fired projectiles weighing over 2,000 pounds at a velocity of almost 1,700 feet per second. At the same time the United States fashioned a monster rifle of 127 tons which had a bore of sixteen inches and fired a projectile of 2,400 pounds with a velocity of 2,300 feet per second. The largest guns ever placed on board ship were the Armstrong one- hundred-and-ten-ton guns of the English battleships, _Sanspareil_, _Benbow_ and _Victoria_. They were sixteen and one-fourth inch calibre. The newest battleships of England, the _Dreadnought_ and the _Temeraire_, are equipped with fourteen-inch guns, but they are not one- half so heavy as the old guns. Many experts in naval ordnance think it a mistake to have guns over twelve inch bore, basing their belief on the experience of the past which showed that guns of a less calibre carrying smaller shells did more effective work than the big bore guns with larger projectiles. The two titanic war-vessels now in course of construction for the United States Navy will each carry a battery of ten fourteen-inch rifles, which will be the most powerful weapons ever constructed and will greatly exceed in range and hitting power the twelve-inch guns of the _Delaware_ or _North Dakota_. Each of the new rifles will weigh over sixty-three tons, the projectiles will each weigh 1,400 pounds and the powder charge will be 450 pounds. At the moment of discharge each of these guns will exert a muzzle energy of 65,600 foot tons, which simply means that the energy will be so great that it could raise 65,600 tons a foot from the ground. The fourteen-hundred-pound projectiles shall be propelled through the air at the rate of half a mile a second. It will be plainly seen that the metal of the guns must be of enormous resistance to withstand such a force. The designers have taken this into full consideration and will see to it that the powder chamber in which the explosion takes place as well as the breech lock on which the shock is exerted is of steel so wrought and tempered as to withstand the terrific strain. At the moment of detonation the shock will be about equal to that of a heavy engine and a train of Pullman coaches running at seventy miles an hour, smashing into a stone wall. On leaving the muzzle of the gun the shell will have an energy equivalent to that of a train of cars weighing 580 tons and running at sixty miles an hour. Such energy will be sufficient to send the projectile through twenty-two and a half inches of the hardest of steel armour at the muzzle, while at a range of 3,000 yards, the projectile moving at the rate of 2,235 feet per second will pierce eighteen and a half inches of steel armor at normal impact. The velocity of the projectile leaving the gun will be 2,600 feet per second, a speed which if maintained would carry it around