With their advantages of greater speed and carrying capacity over the horsed vehicles, their introduction was a most important development, though their working at first imposed a severe financial strain on many companies.
Machine gun detachments, resembling 4-gun batteries and horsed as artillery, were formed to the number of sixteen in 1904-1906.
Afterwards it was decided to form additional small groups of two guns each, less fully horsed, to assist the infantry, and a certain number of these were created in 1906-1908.
The zodiac of Denderah; the Savoyards who carved their pine-forests into toys; the naked Derar, horsed on an idea, charging a troop of Roman cavalry; the long, austere Pythagorean lustrum of silence; Napoleon on the deck of the "Bellerophon," observing the drill of the English soldiers; the Egyptian doctrine that every man has two pairs of eyes; Empedocles and his shoe; the horizontal stratification of the earth; a soft mushroom pushing its way through the hard ground, - all these allusions and a thousand more are found in the same volume.
