Then Nicholl, in a rage, offered to expose his armour-plate to the shock of any kind of projectile, solid, hollow, round, or conical.

The president, who was determined not to compromise his last success, refused.

Nicholl, excited by this unqualified obstinacy, tried to tempt Barbicane by leaving him every advantage.  He proposed to put his plate 200 yards from the gun.  Barbicane still refused.  At 100 yards?  Not even at 75.

“At 50, then,” cried the captain, through the newspapers, “at 25 yards from my plate, and I will be behind it.”

Barbicane answered that even if Captain Nicholl would be in front of it he would not fire any more.

On this reply, Nicholl could no longer contain himself.  He had recourse to personalities; he insinuated cowardice—­that the man who refuses to fire a shot from a cannon is very nearly being afraid of it; that, in short, the artillerymen who fight now at six miles distance have prudently substituted mathematical formulae for individual courage, and that there is as much bravery required to quietly wait for a cannon-ball behind armour-plate as to send it according to all the rules of science.

To these insinuations Barbicane answered nothing.  Perhaps he never knew about them, for the calculations of his great enterprise absorbed him entirely.

When he made his famous communication to the Gun Club, the anger of Captain Nicholl reached its maximum.  Mixed with it was supreme jealousy and a sentiment of absolute powerlessness.  How could he invent anything better than a Columbiad 900 feet long?  What armour-plate could ever resist a projectile of 30,000 lbs.?  Nicholl was at first crushed by this cannon-ball, then he recovered and resolved to crush the proposition by the weight of his best arguments.

He therefore violently attacked the labours of the Gun Club.  He sent a number of letters to the newspapers, which they did not refuse to publish.  He tried to demolish Barbicane’s work scientifically.  Once the war begun, he called reasons of every kind to his aid, reasons it must be acknowledged often specious and of bad metal.

Firstly, Barbicane was violently attacked about his figures.  Nicholl tried to prove by A + B the falseness of his formulae, and he accused him of being ignorant of the rudimentary principles of ballistics.  Amongst other errors, and according to Nicholl’s own calculations, it was impossible to give any body a velocity of 12,000 yards a second.  He sustained, algebra in hand, that even with that velocity a projectile thus heavy would never pass the limits of the terrestrial atmosphere.  It would not even go eight leagues!  Better still.  Granted the velocity, and taking it as sufficient, the shot would not resist the pressure of the gas developed by the combustion of 1,600,000 pounds of powder, and even if it did resist that pressure, it at least would not support such a temperature; it would melt as it issued from the Columbiad, and would fall in red-hot rain on the heads of the imprudent spectators.