stabilizing and maneuvering the piece.

Wheels were perhaps the greatest problem. As early as the 1500's
carpenters and wheelwrights were debating whether dished wheels were
best. "They say," reported Collado, "that the [dished] wheel will
never twist when the artillery is on the march. Others say that a
wheel with spokes angled beyond the cask cannot carry the weight of
the piece without twisting the spoke, so the wheel does not last long.
I am of the same opinion, for it is certain that a perpendicular wheel
will suffer more weight than the other. The defect of twisting under
the pieces when on the march will be remedied by making the cart a
little wider than usual." However, advocates of the dished wheel
finally won.

SMOOTHBORES OF THE LATER PERIOD

From the guns of Queen Elizabeth's time came the 6-, 9-, 12-, 18-,
24-, 32-, and 42-pounder classifications adopted by Cromwell's
government and used by the English well through the eighteenth
century. On the Continent, during much of this period, the French were
acknowledged leaders. Louis XIV (1643-1715) brought several foreign
guns into his ordnance, standardizing a set of calibers (4-, 8-, 12-,
16-, 24-, 32-, and 48-pounders) quite different from Henry II's in the
previous century.

The cannon of the late 1600's was an ornate masterpiece of the
foundryman's art, covered with escutcheons, floral relief, scrolls,
and heavy moldings, the most characteristic of which was perhaps the
banded muzzle (figs. 23b-c, 25, 26a-b), that bulbous bit of
ornamentation which had been popular with designers since the days of
the bombards. The flared or bell-shaped muzzle (figs. 23a, 26c, 27),
did not supplant the banded muzzle until the eighteenth century, and,
while the flaring bell is a usual characteristic of ordnance founded
between 1730 and 1830, some banded-muzzle guns were made as late as
1746 (fig. 26a).

By 1750; however, design and construction were fairly well
standardized in a gun of much cleaner line than the cannon of 1650.
Although as yet there had been no sharp break with the older
traditions, the shape and weight of the cannon in relation to the
stresses of firing were becoming increasingly important to the men who
did the designing.

Conditions in eighteenth century England were more or less typical: in
the 1730's Surveyor-General Armstrong's formulae for gun design were
hardly more than continuations of the earlier ways. His guns were
about 20 calibers lon