y-casemated works,
when properly constructed and properly armed, will not effectually
resist a naval cannonade, whether from ships or floating-batteries. The
results of recent wars, and of the West Point experiments by General
Totten, would seem to prove them abundantly capable of doing this.
Against such proofs the mere _ad captandum_ assertion of their
incapacity can have but little weight--certainly not enough to justify
the abandonment of a system approved by the best military authorities
of this country and Europe, and sanctioned by long experience.

Major Barnard, in speaking of the capacity of masonry casemated forts to
resist the fire of a hostile armament, and of the propriety of
abandoning them for earthen batteries in our system of Coast Defences,
uses the following forcible language:--"When we bear in mind that the
hostile 'floating batteries,' of whatever description, will themselves
be exposed to the most formidable projectiles that can be thrown from
shore batteries,--that when they choose to come to 'close quarters,' to
attempt to breach, _their_ 'embrasures' present openings through which
deluges of grape, canister, and musket balls can be poured upon the
gunners; and consider what experience has so far shown, and reason has
taught us, with regard to the casemate,--we need not be under
apprehension that our casemated works will be battered down; nor doubt
that they will, as they did in Russia, answer the important purposes for
which they were designed."

"It only remains to show the _necessity_ of such works. It, in general,
costs much less to place a gun behind an earthen parapet, than to build
a masonry structure covered with bomb-proof arches, in which to mount
it. All authorities agree that an open barbette battery (Grivel's very
forcible admission has been quoted), on a low site, and to which vessels
can approach within 300 or 400 yards, is utterly inadmissible. It may
safely be said, that in nine cases out of ten, the sites which furnish
the efficient raking and cross fires upon the channels, are exactly of
this character; and indeed it very often happens that there are _no
others_."

"When such sites _are_ found, it rarely happens that they afford room
for sufficient number of guns in open batteries. Hence the necessity of
putting them tier above tier, which involves, of course, the casemated
structure. Such works, furnishing from their lower tier a low, raking
fire, and (if of several tiers)