Mortars were first used to expel red-hot balls and large stones, long ere shells were known. They are believed to have been of German origin, and were used at the siege of Naples by Charles VIII. in 1435; but shells were first thrown out of them at the siege of Wachtendonk in Gueldres, by the Count of Mansfield. Shells were first invented by a citizen of Venloo, who, at a festival in honour of the Duke of Cleves, contrived, unfortunately, by the explosion of them, to reduce nearly the whole city to ashes. Maltus, an English engineer, first taught the French how to use them at the siege of La Motte in 1634. (Le Blond.) The howitzer differs from the mortar, being mounted on a field carriage, like a gun; the chief difference being that the trunnions of the first are at the end, and of the other in the middle. The invention of the howitzer is subsequent to that of the mortar, as from the latter it originated. The first man who invented the spiking of artillery was Gaspar Vimercalus of Bremen, who thus nailed up the artillery of Sigismund Malatesta. Rifled cannon are by no means a modern invention, and can be traced far back into antiquity, as the _arquebuse-rayée_ of the French. No kind of gun has been more universally known and used all over Europe and America than the carronade, or "smasher," as it was called. Cast at the Carron Works in Scotland (hence their name), they were the invention of General Robert Melville, an officer who served under Lord Rollo of Duncrub, at the capture of Dominica in the West Indies. Peculiarly constructed, and having a chamber for powder like a mortar, they were shorter and lighter than ordinary cannon. Cast in mighty numbers for more than seventy years at Carron, they were employed by the fighting and mercantile marine of all Europe and America, till the time of the Crimean War. The first of them was presented by the Carron Company to the family of General Melville, with an inscription on the carriage, which records that the guns were cast "for solid, ship, shell or carcase shot, and were first used against the French fleet in 1799." Mr. Smiles, in his "Industrial Biography," tells us that when cannon came to be employed in war, the vicinity of Sussex to the Cinque Ports gave it an advantage over the iron districts of the north and west of England, and for a long time the iron works of that county had a monopoly in the manufacture of guns. The stone balls were hewn from quarries at Maidstone Heath. An old mortar, which lay on Bridge Green, near Frant, is said to have been the _first_ used in England. The chamber was cast, but the tube consisted of hooped bars.