With the advent of modern gun mountings the old anomaly of the divided responsibility of War Office and Admiralty became unbearable; the necessity for a close adaptation of each gun to its ship-position, for careful co-ordination of the work of artillerist, engineer and shipbuilder, produced a crisis which had important effects on future naval administration. A single paragraph will suffice to show the position as it presented itself in the early ’sixties. “There were a thousand points of possible collision,” wrote the biographer of Captain Cooper Key, the captain of the _Excellent_, “as it became more and more certain that gun carriages, instead of being loose movable structures capable of being used in any port, were henceforth to be fixed in the particular port which was adapted for them, with special pivoting bolts and deck racers--all part of the ship’s structure. Where the War Office work began and the Controller’s ended in these cases, no one knew, but the captain of the _Excellent_ came in as one interfering between a married pair, and was misunderstood and condemned on both sides.” In 1866 the solution was found. Captain Cooper Key was appointed to the Admiralty as Director-General of Naval Ordnance. CHAPTER VII THE SHELL GUN The chief function of land artillery in its earlier days was the destruction of material. The huge engines of the ancients were of value in effecting from a safe distance what the tortoise and the battering-ram could only do at close quarters: the breaching of walls and the battering-in of gates, doors and bulwarks. After the invention of gunpowder the use of artillery remained, we have seen, substantially the same. Apart from the moral effect on horse and man of the “monstrous roare of noise” when in defence, the offensive object of ordnance was almost entirely the breaching of the enemy’s works. The guns were literally “pieces of battery,” doing their slow work by the momentum of their large projectiles.