BOWS AND ARROWS — KLOPSTEG 581 



shoot so I snuck off on the side, nocked an arrow, picked a point of aim some- 

 what nearer than with the older bow, and let er go. I haven't seen that arrow 

 since. I just hope it didn't plug someone. . . . When the gang started shooting 



at 100 yards, Mr. joined me and helped me try it out. . . . He was 



drawing only 26 inches, so was losing a lot. But his point of aim at 100 was 

 somewhere about the 40 yard line. He shot a couple, and it pretty well broke 

 up the shoot because the gang gathered around as soon as they saw the flat 

 trajectory. . . . 



Publication in the early 1930's of a series of articles on the design 

 and performance of the new bow met with some skepticism by tradi- 

 tion-bomid archers, but it also met with widely increasing acceptance. 

 As more archers acquired bows of the new design they were able to 

 verify the published statements about performance. It took only a 

 relatively few years for the longbow virtually to disappear from tour- 

 nament shooting lines. 



In parallel with the acceptance of the bow of scientific design, an- 

 other circumstance strongly influenced the continuing improvement 

 of bows. In the early 1930's I had begun to make a collection of books 

 on archery, most of which are of English origin, published from the 

 16th century onward. Among the items in the collection is a complete 

 run of an annual review volume called "The Archer's Register," be- 

 ginning in 1864 and continuing through 1915. Some of these con- 

 tained seemingly authentic information as well as some conjecture 

 about the practice of archery in Turkey in the 15th and later cen- 

 turies. One assertion was the almost incredible one that the Turks had 

 shot arrows a distance of a half mile — incredible, certainly, to those 

 who knew only the limited range of the longbow. My technical in- 

 terest stirred me to discover whether this might be true, and if so, 

 how it had been accomplished. 



In my exploration of Turkish archery, I was fortunate in being able 

 to obtain a book by Mustafa Kani, printed in old Turkish with Arabic- 

 Persian calligraphy, published in Constantinople in 1847, and bearing 

 the title, "Excerpts from the Writings of the Archers." Among the 

 things reported was the construction and methods of shooting the 

 Turkish bow. 



Because of my inability to read Turkish, it was fortunate that I 

 later discovered two other publications concerning Turkish bows and 

 arrows, both based almost wholly on the book by Kani. The first 

 was a paper entitled "Concerning Bows and Arrows : Their Use and 

 Construction by the Arabs and Turks," by Dr. Freiherr Hammar- 

 Purgstall, presented before the Imperial Academy of Sciences of 

 Austria-Hungary and published in the proceedings of the Academy. 

 The second, "Bowyery and Archery among the Osmanli Turks," by 

 Joachim Hein, was published serially in three successive issues in 

 1921-22 of the German periodical "Der Islam." These two sources, 

 both in German, which I read easily, were of substantial help in giving 



