A certain amount. of eXcitement appears to prevail among our Chinese contemporaries over the report that the Mukden Arsenal has succeeded\in producing a new type of gun. Details are unfortunately very vague. but it is called a "'scattering gun" capable of shooting off 100 bullets, or possibly pieces of shrapnel, at one time. Whether bullets or shrapnel are meant we ara not told, and in fact we are left pretty well in the dark as to its possibilities, which, however, are apparently regarded as considerable. From the meagre particulars given it might, of course, be no more than a field gun, a 15 or 18- pounder specially designed for firing at point-blank range, when we believe the scattering effect of shrapnel is found to be considerable.
Or it might prove a reversion to the type of gun in use before the days of modern ordnance, when grape, langridge, case and similar forms of shot, each with a specific purpose, were fired. Such reversion is not at all outside the probabilities, for during the war we went quite a long way back to the days of mortars, grenades and the like, and then improved upon them.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.