Immediately below the barrel of the gun, a box is placed, containing the belt which carries the cartridges. The belts vary in length. Those commonly used are seven feet long, and capable of holding three hundred and thirty-three cartridges; shorter ones hold one hundred and twenty cartridges; but the several pieces can be joined together for continuous firing. Single shots can be fired at any time whether the belt is in position or not--in the former case by pressing a button, which prevents the recoil; in the latter, by hand-loading in the ordinary way. To start firing, one end of the belt is inserted in the gun, the trigger is pulled by the hand once, after which the movement becomes continuous and automatic as long as the supply of cartridges lasts. At each recoil of the barrel, the belt is pushed sufficiently onward to bring the next cartridge into position; the mechanism grasps this cartridge, draws it from the belt, and passes it on to the barrel. Should a faulty or an empty cartridge find its way in, and the gun does not go off in consequence, there is of course no recoil to keep up the repeating action, and the mechanism ceases to work until the obstruction is removed. To devise and adjust the necessary parts of the machine with such precision that each part performs its proper function at the exact moment pre-arranged for it--to do all this while the gun fires at the enormous rate of six hundred rounds a minute, must have cost an immensity of thought, of labour, and of time. The 'Colt Automatic Gun,' a new machine gun manufactured by the Colt Firearms Company, of Hartford, Connecticut, promised in 1896 to be a rival to the Maxim, as it fired 400 shots a minute. Hiram S. Maxim was born in the state of Maine in 1840, and in his fourteenth year was apprenticed to a carriage-builder. From his father, who had a wood-working factory and mill, he learned the use of tools and derived his inventive turn of mind. After some experience in metal-working in his uncle's works at Fitchburg, he was in turn a philosophical instrument maker, and on the staff of some ironworkers and shipbuilders. About 1877 he became a consulting electrical engineer, a branch of science which he studied and became master of in a short time. Some of the earliest electric lights in the States were devised and erected by him. He was in England and Europe in 1880 in order to investigate electrical methods there. He was back in London in 1883, and after that visit, like Siemens, he made it his headquarters. What leisure he now had (1883-4) on hand he devoted to inventing his automatic machine gun, which should load and fire itself, and the British government was the first to recognise its merits and adopt it. The making of it has been taken over by the Maxim-Nordenfelt Gun Company, which has a capital of about two millions sterling.