pumping
water, drainage, irrigation, elevating, grinding, shelling, and cleaning
grain, ginning cotton, sawing wood, churning, running stamp mills, and
charging electrical accumulators. This last may be the solution of the
St. Louis gas question.

In the writer's opinion the settlement of the great tableland lying
between the Mississippi Valley and the Rocky Mountains, and extending
from the Gulf of Mexico to the Red River of the North, would be greatly
retarded, if not entirely impracticable, in large sections where no
water is found at less than 100 to 500 feet below the surface, if it
were not for the American wind mill; large cattle ranges without any
surface water have been made available by the use of wind mills. Water
pumped out of the ground remains about the same temperature during the
year, and is much better for cattle than surface water. It yet remains
in the future to determine what the wind mill will not do with the
improvements that are being made from to time.

* * * * *

THE PNEUMATIC DYNAMITE GUN.

It is here shown as mounted on a torpedo launch and ready for action.
The shell or projectile is fired by compressed air, admitted from an air
reservoir underneath by a simple pressure of the gunner's finger over
the valve. The air passes up through the center of the base, the pipe
connecting with one of the hollow trunnions. The valve is a continuation
of the breech of the gun. The smaller cuts illustrate Lieutenant
Zalinski's plan for mounting the gun on each side of the launch, by
which plan the gun after being charged may have the breech containing
the dynamite depressed, and protected from shots of the enemy by its
complete immersion alongside the launch; and, if necessary, may be
discharged from this protected position. The gun is a seamless brass
tube of about forty feet in length, manipulated by the artillerist in
the manner of an ordinary cannon. Its noiseless discharge sends the
missile with great force, conveying the powerful explosive within it,
which is itself discharged internally upon contact with the deck of a
vessel or other object upon which it strikes, through the explosion of a
percussion fuse in the point of the projectile. A great degree of
accuracy has been obtained by the peculiar form of the projectile.

[Illustration: PNEUMATIC DYNAMITE GUN TORPEDO VESSEL.]

The projectile consists of a thin metal tube, into which the charge is
inserted,