11 MAY 1867, Page 2

The papers say the story about the new French gun

which shoots people without powder or smoke is quite true. The weapon is really a sling improved up to the nineteenth-century standard. Bullets are placed in a circular groove on a disc of steel, which, driven by a wheel of much greater diameter, revolves at a pro- digious pace, and hurls out the bullets at the rate of about three hundred per minute. They strike as hard as rifle balls. We do not vouch for the acCount, but it is trusted by a correspondent of the Times, and is not mechanically impossible, as anybody may test with a tin spinning top and a pea.