Excerpt from A Vindication of Phrenology

I was first introduced to Felice Orsini, a highly educated, refined, and courteous Italian gentleman, in the autumn of 1857, and having lived for a while in Italy and witnessed the iniquities of the Austrian, Papal, and Ducal despotisms that crushed the nation, I heartily sympathised with his patriotic yearnings for the liberation of his country. He told me that the people were preparing for a great effort to repel the Austrians and drive the French army of occupation from Rome, but that the_ search for arms was so rigorous that no ordinary weapons could be imported or held by the Italian patriots. He had therefore invented a'new form of stellar gas: burner which could easily be converted into a bomb by simply unscrewing the radiating gas nipples and replacing them by gun nipples, or by making the gas nipples small enough to fit percussion caps. This gas head or receptacle was to be filled with an explosive composition, plugged at the place where it screwed to the gas-pipe, and the nipples armed with caps. It might then be used as a hand grenade to be thrown from house tops and windows among any of the soldiers of the enemy who should attempt to occupy the streets and fire upon the population of an insurgent town.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.