in August, 1836, he applied to the Ordnance for permission to have a trial of the conical ball made; this was granted, and the experiment was conducted under Major Walcott of the Royal Artillery, on the sands near Tynemouth Castle, the firing party consisting of a company of the 60th Rifles.  Mr. Greener having failed to bring a target, to test the superior penetrating power of his balls, the ordinary Artillery target was used.  Mr. Greener’s ball had a conical plug of lead in the hollow, for the purpose of producing the expansion when driven home by the force of the powder.  After firing several rounds at two hundred yards, only one ball of Mr. Greener’s, which had struck the target, was found to have the plug driven home, the others had all lost their plugs.  The same effect was produced when firing into a sand-bank.  A trial was then made at 350 yards; the spherical balls and the conical balls both went home to the target, but only one of the latter penetrated.

The objections pointed out to the conical ball were:  the frequent loss of the plug, by which its weight was diminished; the inconvenience of having a hall composed of two separate parts; the difficulty of loading if the plug was not placed accurately in the centre; and the danger of the plug losing its place in consequence of being put in loosely, especially when carried about for any length of time in a cartridge.—­Mr. Greener loaded the rifles during the trial with the ball and powder separate, not in cartridge.—­The advantage admitted was, merely, rapidity of loading if the plug was fairly placed:  no superiority of range appears to have been produced over the rifles used by the 60th Regiment.  Mr. Greener solicited another trial, but after the report of Major Walcott, the Select Committee considering the ball “useless and chimerical,” no further trial was accorded.  The conical ball question was thus once more doomed to oblivion.

In process of time the fabulous ranges of the “Carabine a Tige” were heard of, and when it was ascertained that the French riflemen potted the gunners on the ramparts of Rome with such rapidity that they could not stand to their guns before a rifle nearly a mile distant, the cone shape once more turned up, and Captain Minie came forward as the champion of the old expanding ball.  The toscin of war was sounded in the East; the public were crying aloud for British arms to be put upon an equality with those of foreign armies; the veterans who had earned their laurels under poor old “Brown Bess” stuck faithfully to her in her death-struggle, and dropped a tear over the triumph of new-fangled notions.