a military engine used by the ancient Greeks and Romans for discharging arrows, lances, and stones. In accounts of ancient sieges and other military operations, this word frequently occurs in conjunction with ballista; and under that head it will be seen that the two were frequently confounded by writers subsequent to the time of Julius Caesar. The chief use of the catapult appears to have been to shoot the enemy when they appeared on the walls during a siege; the ballista being employed to discharge stones against the battlements, while the force of the aries or battering-ram was directed against the solid walls. Catapults were distinguished, as were also the ballista, into greater and less, but were of a long form, whereas the ballista were square. Their construction, however, must be a matter of conjecture, though it is probable that the principle of their projectile force differed little from that of the ballista. Dr Adam remarks in his Antiquities, that the most powerful of the catapulte, ballista, and scorpiones, may be regarded “as gigantic cross-bows, consisting not of a single beam or spring but of two distinct beams, each of which was inserted into an upright coil of ropes tightly twisted in such a manner that the extremities of the arms could not be drawn towards each other without increasing the tension of the ropes so as to produce a most violent recoil.” Some of the spears and darts thrown by the catapults are said to have been 18 feet long, and to have been projected with such velocity as to take fire in their course. This, of course, is absurd; but it is not improbable that spears with firebrands attached to them were sometimes projected from these engines.