In England the arguments in favour of a new and more scientific adjustment of ship armament had not until this date been clearly formulated. Of the tendency to a single calibre there certainly had been many demonstrations in the last decades of the eighteenth century: a tendency favoured by the replacement of the smaller long guns of the fleet by carronades. Sir Howard Douglas, in his _Naval Gunnery_, the first edition of which was published in 1820, had demonstrated the advantages of large calibre, the inefficiency of random broadsides, and the high importance of the deliberate aim of single guns. And in 1825, before the French began to remodel their ordnance, Colonel Munro, of the Royal Artillery, submitted his project to the naval authorities of arming our ships solely with 32-pounders, of different classes and weights to suit the various circumstances. But no radical revision of armament was made in the British navy until some years after the French had made the great stride of 1829, already described. Unity of calibre, then, was no novel idea on the part of M. Paixhans. “No project,” says Dahlgren--“no project has proved more attractive to naval men than that of having a uniform calibre throughout the entire fleet. It has been proposed from time to time without success, until adopted for the French navy in 1829. “In the promptness with which the example was followed by England and the United States, may be recognized the general convictions of the profession in regard to the serious mischief inseparable from the chaos of calibres that prevailed, and the urgent necessity for some measure that would simplify the complex economy of naval ordnance. “In a three-decker might be witnessed the extreme phase of the evil: long 32-pounders, 18-pounders, and carronades, requiring three sizes of shot and four classes of full charge, with as many reduces as caprice might suggest. All this variety of supply was to be distinguished and selected in the magazines and shot-lockers--circulated with perfect exactness in the confusion and obscurity of the lower passages, to a particular hatchway, then up to the deck where was placed the gun for which each charge or shot was designed: and this was to be accomplished, not with the composure, deliberation, and attention that the nature of the operation itself demanded, but amid all the excitement and hot haste of battle.”[108]