Avertunt somnos.—Horat.
from those unhappy mortals not similarly provided.* Let it even be mixed with wax, let even the rains be the season of their operations, and their eternal croaking, while it may be distracting the ears of his next neighbours, is as inaudible to him as if he were in Seriphus or Sicendus.* Happy the he-goat on whose forehead it is rubbed! for he can put to flight all competitors. Happy the city which has its skin! for if drawn round the walls and suspended from the entrance gate, no hail will fall within it, or blast the tender crops of its inhabitants:*
Expectata seges vanis eludet aristis.—Georg. i. 226.
On the whole, then, we may conclude that fire-arms of some kind were used in the early stages of Indian History;* that the
missiles were explosive; and that the time or mode of ignition was dependent on pleasure; that projectiles were used which were made to adhere to gates, buildings, and machines, setting fire to them from a considerable distance; that it is probable that saltpetre, the principal ingredient of gunpowder, and the cause of its detonation, entered into the composition, because the earth of Gangetic India is richly impregnated with it in a natural state of preparation, and it may be extracted from it by lixiviation and crystallization without the aid of fire; and that sulphur may, for the same reason, have been mixed with it, as it is abundant in the north-west of India.
This destructive agent appears to have fallen into disuse before we reach authentic history, and, notwithstanding the assertions to the contrary, there seems reason to suppose that, at the time of the Muhammadan invasion, the only inflammable projectiles which were known were of a more simple nature, composed chiefly, if not entirely, of bituminous substances,—from naphtha, the most liquid, to asphaltum, the most solid of them,—and that, whether from cumbrousness or “ineffectual fires,” they were very rarely brought into action.
It is not to be gathered for certain that the natives of Southern India were superior in the use of artillery to the Portuguese on their first arrival; but, even if they were, they might easily have acquired their skill from Egypt, Persia, and Arabia, with which during the period of Muhammadan supremacy there was constant communication; so that there is nothing in the testimony of either native or foreign witnesses sufficiently positive to lead to the conclusion that, in modern times at least, the knowledge of fire-arms was indigenous in India, and antecedent to their use in Europe.