Captain Gillmore did not rest satisfied with the reduction of Fort Pulaski. He made it the means of further information in gunnery and military engineering. His records showed the number of shots fired from each gun and mortar during the bombardment, the percentage of those which were effective or failed to reach the mark, and the depth of penetration of the different kinds of projectiles in the walls of the fort; and he compared the results with those given by the best military authorities. It was the first time that rifled cannon had been used in actual warfare against masonry walls; and he found that they could do more execution at longer range and with less weight of metal, than any of the older forms of artillery. He showed that, with such guns, walls of solid brickwork, over seven feet thick, could be breached at the distance of nearly one mile; more than twice as far as it had ever before been thought practicable. Had it not been for his confident and steady persistence in this design, it is likely that the occupation of Tybee island would have been a useless enterprise.
After the fall of Fort Pulaski the troops on Daufuskie island were released for other duty. General Viele was ordered north, and became the military governor of Norfolk on its recapture from the enemy early in May. Before the end of that month, I was again at Hilton Head, acting as medical director for the troops at that point.
[Here the manuscript ends, unfinished.]
After Surgeon Dalton's service with the Seventh Regiment of Infantry of The National Guard of the State of New York, he was commissioned by President Lincoln, August 3, 1861, Brigade Surgeon of Volunteers (afterwards Surgeon United States Volunteers); served as Surgeon in Chief to General Viele's command in South Carolina; as Medical Inspector of the Department of the South; and as Chief Medical officer on Morris Island, South Carolina.
His health became seriously impaired by his long continued service in the malarial regions of the South, so as to incapacitate him for duty, and he consequently resigned from the Army, March 5, 1864.
As soon as his health, never fully restored, permitted, he resumed his work as Professor of Physiology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York; resigned in 1883; was elected President of the College in 1884, and so continued until his death, which occurred in New York, February 12, 1889, at the age of sixty-four years and ten days.