Note 106 — Chapter VII · THE SHELL GUN

“As for guns,” wrote Fuller in his Worthies of England, comparing the relative merits of the inventions of printing and gunpowder, “it cannot be denied, that though most behold them as instruments of cruelty; partly, because subjecting valour to chance; partly, because guns give no quarter (which the sword sometimes doth); yet it will appear that, since their invention, Victory hath not stood so long a neuter, and hath been determined with the loss of fewer lives.”