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 of his court. The pope is the ordinarius of the whole Roman Catholic Church, and is sometimes described as ordinarius ordinariorum. Similarly in the Church of England the king is legally the supreme ordinary, as the source of jurisdiction.

The use of the term ordinary is not confined to ecclesiastical jurisdiction. In the civil law the judex ordinarius is a judge who has regular jurisdiction as of course and of common right as opposed to persons extraordinarily appointed. The term survived throughout the middle ages wherever the Roman law gained a foothold. In the Byzantine empire it was applied to any one filling a regular office (e.g. ＝consul ordinarius,  ＝praefectus ordinarius); but it also occasionally implied rank as distinct from office, all those who had the title of clarissimus being sometimes described as . In England the only case of the term being employed in its civil use was that of the office of judge ordinary created by the Divorce Act of 1857, a title which was, however, only in existence for the space of about eighteen years owing to the incorporation of the Divorce Court with the High Court of Justice by the Judicature Act 1875. But in Scotland the ordinary judges of the Inner and Outer Houses are called lords ordinary, the junior lord ordinary of the Outer House acts as lord ordinary of the bills, the second junior as lord ordinary on teinds, the third junior as lord ordinary on Exchequer causes. In the United States the ordinary possesses, in the states where such an officer exists, powers vested in him by the constitution and acts of the legislature identical with those usually vested in the courts of probate. In South Carolina he was a judicial officer, but the office no longer exists, as South Carolina has now a probate court.

In the German universities the Professor ordinarius is the occupant of one of the regular and permanent chairs in any faculty.

ORDINATE, in the Cartesian system of co-ordinates, the distance of a point from the horizontal axis (axis of x) measured parallel to the axis of y. Thus PR is the ordinate of P. The word appears to have been first used by René Descartes, and to be derived from lineae ordinatae, a term used by Roman surveyors for parallel lines. (See : Analytical.)

ORDNANCE (a syncopated form of “ordinance” or ordonnance,” so spelt in this sense since the 17th century), a general term for great guns for military and naval purposes, as opposed to “small arms” and their equipment; hence the term also includes miscellaneous stores under the control of the ordnance department as organized. In England the Master-General of the Ordnance, from Henry VIII.’s time, was head of a board, partly military, partly civil, which managed all affairs concerning the artillery, engineers and matériel of the army; this was abolished in 1855, its duties being distributed. The making of surveys and maps (see ) was, for instance, handed over eventually (1889) to the Board of Agriculture, though the term “ordnance survey” still shows the origin.

The efficiency of any weapon depends entirely on two factors: (1) its power to destroy men and material, (2) the moral effect upon the enemy. Even at the present day the moral effect of gun fire is of great importance, but when guns were first used the noise they made on discharge must have produced a bewildering fear in those without previous experience of them; more especially would this be the case with horses and other animals. Villani wrote of the battle of Cressy that the “English guns made a noise like thunder and caused much loss in men and horses” (Hime, Proc. R. A. Institution, vol. 26). Now, the moral effect may be considered more or less constant, for, as men are educated to the presence of artillery, the range of guns, their accuracy, mobility and on shore their invisibility, so increase that there is always the ever present fear that the stroke will fall without giving any evidence of whence it came. On the other hand, the development of the gun has always had an upward tendency, which of late years has been very marked; the demand for the increase of energy has kept pace with—or rather in recent times may be said to have caused—improvements in metallurgical science.

The evolution of ordnance may be divided roughly into three epochs. The first includes that period during which stone shot were principally employed; the guns during this period (1313 to 1520) were mostly made of wrought iron, although the art of casting bronze was then well known. This was due to the fact that guns were made of large size to fire heavy stone shot, and, in consequence, bronze guns would be very expensive, besides which wrought iron was the stronger material. The second epoch was that extending from 1520 to 1854, during which cast iron round shot were generally employed. In this epoch, both bronze and cast iron ordnance were used, but the progress achieved was remarkably small. The increase of power actually obtained was due to the use of corn, instead of serpentine, powder, but guns were undoubtedly much better proportioned towards the middle and end of this period than they were at the beginning. The third or present epoch may be said to have commenced in 1854, when elongated projectiles and rifled guns were beginning to be adopted. The rapid progress made during this period is as remarkable as the unproductiveness of the second epoch. Even during recent years the call for greater power has produced results which were believed to be impossible in 1890.

The actual date of the introduction of cannon, and the country in which they first appeared, have been the subject of much antiquarian research; but no definite conclusion has been arrived at. Some writers suppose (see Brackenbury, “Ancient Cannon in Europe” in Proc. Royal Artillery Inst., vol. iv.) that gunpowder was the result of a gradual development from incendiary compounds, such as Greek and sea fire of far earlier times, and that cannon followed in natural sequence. Other writers attribute the invention of cannon to the Chinese or Arabs. In any case, after their introduction into Europe a comparatively rapid progress was made. Early in the 14th century the first guns were small and vase shaped; towards the end they had become of huge dimensions firing heavy stone shot of from 200 to 450 ℔ weight.

The earliest known representation of a gun in England is contained in an illuminated manuscript “De Officiis Regum” at Christ Church, Oxford, of the time of Edward II. (1326). This clearly shows a knight in armour firing a short primitive weapon shaped something like a vase and loaded with an incendiary arrow. This type of gun was a muzzle loader with a vent channel at the breech end. There seems to be undoubted evidence that in 1338 there existed breech-loading guns of both iron and brass, provided with one or more movable chambers to facilitate loading (Proc. R. A. I., vol. iv. p. 291). These firearms were evidently very small, as only 2 ℔ of gunpowder were provided for firing 48 arrows, or about seven-tenths of an ounce for each charge. EB1911 - Ordnance Fig. 1.png

The great Bombarde of Ghent, called “Dulle Griete” (fig. 1) is believed to belong to the end of the century, probably about 1382, and, according to the Guide des voyageurs dans la ville de Gand (Voisin) the people of Ghent used it in 1411. This gun,