When the _Bomb Ketch_, a ship firing bombs and shells, was introduced into our navy in the seventeenth century, the French were particularly angered by the “inhumanity” of the English in firing “inflammable fire balls and shells.” Again in the eighteenth century we find the Marechal de Conflans issuing an order against the use of hollow shot or incendiary shell because they “were not generally used by polite nations, and the French ought to fight according to the laws of honour.” At the battle of the Nile in 1798 the French flagship _L’Orient_ took fire and blew up, and when the French sailors reproached the English for using incendiary missiles the latter repudiated the charge, and mentioned that they had found such unlawful weapons in one of the prizes they had taken; thus the hollowness of the French regard for humane warfare was neatly demonstrated. Whilst Great Britain did not scruple to fire lyddite shells at the Boers, their wives, and their children at Paardeberg, she prided herself on her abstention from the use of explosive or expanding bullets, and much abuse was heaped on the Boers for their employment of such. It may, however, be doubted whether a bullet which kills you right off at once, or at any rate which disables you permanently for a long time, is not preferable to one which is of so mild a nature that you can be shot over and over again, alternating your appearances on the battlefield with visits to the hospital. A lecture on “Explosive Bullets and their Application to Military Purposes” was delivered before the Royal United Service Institution in 1868 by Major G. V. Fosbery, the first officer to use these projectiles in the field, systematically and to any large extent, against some of the mountain tribes of the North-West frontier of India. The lecturer tells us that the natives considered them unfair on two grounds—firstly, because they exploded in an objectionable way; secondly, because there was nothing they could collect of them afterwards, as in the case of ordinary bullets. But more civilised people complained of the use of “rifle shell” on the ground of their Satanic nature, and to these Major Fosbery replies as follows: “The arguments which condemn a warlike instrument simply on the grounds of its destructiveness to life, provided that it neither adds keen agony to wounds nor new terrors to death itself, are, if logically pursued, simply retrogressive, and even if not recommending by implication a return to the bow and arrow, at all events point to the old times of protracted wars and deaths from fatigue and disease far exceeding in number those caused by the weapons of an enemy. We can therefore afford to set these on one side, or rather we are bound to neglect them altogether and seriously consider any invention which under the conditions above laid down promises us a more certainly destructive fire than that attainable _cæteris paribus_ by the arms at present included in our war material.”