President Barbicane had, without losing any time, nominated a working committee in the heart of the Gun Club.  This committee was in three sittings to elucidate the three great questions of the cannon, the projectile, and the powder.  It was composed of four members very learned upon these matters.  Barbicane had the casting vote, and with him were associated General Morgan, Major Elphinstone, and, lastly, the inevitable J.T.  Maston, to whom were confided the functions of secretary.

On the 8th of October the committee met at President Barbicane’s house, No. 3, Republican-street; as it was important that the stomach should not trouble so important a debate, the four members of the Gun Club took their seats at a table covered with sandwiches and teapots.  J.T.  Maston immediately screwed his pen on to his steel hook and the business began.

Barbicane opened the meeting as follows:—­

“Dear colleagues,” said he, “we have to solve one of the more important problems in ballistics—­that greatest of sciences which treats of the movement of projectiles—­that is to say, of bodies hurled into space by some power of impulsion and then left to themselves.”

“Oh, ballistics, ballistics!” cried J.T.  Maston in a voice of emotion.

“Perhaps,” continued Barbicane, “the most logical thing would be to consecrate this first meeting to discussing the engine.”

“Certainly,” answered General Morgan.

“Nevertheless,” continued Barbicane, “after mature deliberation, it seems to me that the question of the projectile ought to precede that of the cannon, and that the dimensions of the latter ought to depend upon the dimensions of the former.”

J.T.  Maston here interrupted the president, and was heard with the attention which his magnificent past career deserved.

“My dear friends,” said he in an inspired tone, “our president is right to give the question of the projectile the precedence of every other; the cannon-ball we mean to hurl at the moon will be our messenger, our ambassador, and I ask your permission to regard it from an entirely moral point of view.”

This new way of looking at a projectile excited the curiosity of the members of the committee; they therefore listened attentively to the words of J.T.  Maston.

“My dear colleagues,” he continued, “I will be brief.  I will lay aside the material projectile—­the projectile that kills—­in order to take up the mathematical projectile—­the moral projectile.  A cannon-ball is to me the most brilliant manifestation of human power, and by creating it man has approached nearest to the Creator!”

“Hear, hear!” said Major Elphinstone.

“In fact,” cried the orator, “if God has made the stars and the planets, man has made the cannon-ball—­that criterion of terrestrial speed—­that reduction of bodies wandering in space which are really nothing but projectiles.  Let Providence claim the speed of electricity, light, the stars, comets, planets, satellites, sound, and wind!  But ours is the speed of the cannon-ball—­a hundred times greater than that of trains and the fastest horses!”