eing
raised to those elevated posts which require a combination of faculties.
If the object of General Gillmore's original appointment was to silence
Fort Sumter and to throw shell into Charleston, he was undoubtedly the
man who could "do the job." If the aim was to take Charleston with a
small military force, or even a large one, the wisdom of the choice was
less clear. If the intent was to govern an important Department, without
reference to further conquests,--to regulate trade, organize industry,
free the slaves, educate the freedmen,--then the selection was still
more doubtful. For this sphere of action, which had seemed so important
to Mitchell and to Hunter, was foreign to Gillmore's whole habits and
temperament, and he never could galvanize himself into caring for it.
His strong point, after all, was in dealing with metal rather than with
men, white or black. And as (since the disaster at Olustee) he can
hardly be charged with any squeamish unwillingness to throw upon others
the chief responsibility of any seeming failures of his own, it is
perhaps fortunate that in this book he is able to keep chiefly upon the
ground where he is strongest.

Yet, after all, the work is historical as well as scientific. And there
is in it such a mingling of great questions of philanthropy with mere
questions of grooving, and black soldiers jostle so inextricably with
black guns, that the common reader and the mere student of human nature
will find an interest in the book, as well as that intelligent lady of
our acquaintance, who, having heard of the brilliant ornithology of the
tropics, was eager to read about the hundred-pound "Parrotts" of South
Carolina.

As to the guns, the contributions of this superbly illustrated volume
are of the very greatest value. Nothing in print equals it, except Mr.
Holley's recent great treatise, some of whose tables are here also
employed by permission. Here we find the most authentic statements, both
as to the work done by the large rifled guns, and as to that trick of
bursting which is their gravest weakness. But for this, the heavy
ordnance of Parrott would be a magnificent success. And when we consider
that six two-hundred pounders and seventeen one-hundred pounders were
burst during the siege of Charleston, as recorded in this volume,--that
five one-hundred pounders are said to have been burst in a single week
on Morris Island at a later period, and that Admiral Porter reports six
similar i