BREAKING AND HANDLING. 55 



CHAPTER II, 



NOMENCLATURE. 



Each art or science, possessing any general importance, 

 has a comprehensive, supplementary, special language which 

 serves to express, concisely and clearly, all the prominent 

 peculiarities and relations of peculiarities belonging to it. 

 Such abundance of technical terms is necessary, in treating 

 of an art which has a variety of complex details, to afford 

 the necessary forms of expression, and the consequent 

 greater precision, fullness and conciseness. 



Unfortunately, field sports, as related to the dog and gun, 

 are an exception to the rule, the technique being loose, partly 

 vague, inelegant, scanty and insufficient. This entails a 

 great deal of unnecessary circumlocution and obscurity in 

 all sporting literature, the finer thoughts and shades of color 

 being lost in diffuse expressions or tiresome repetitions, or 

 only the main ideas are given by reason of the trouble of 

 constructing phrases to portray the collateral ideas. 



It is strange that field sports should be the exception. 

 Considering the general and uniform distribution of the 

 setter and pointer, and the corresponding magnitude of field 

 sports which exists at present, the care and importance at- 

 tached to their breeding and training, and the many ages in 

 the past during which they were highly valued, and the 

 monetary value and facility afforded by an established sport- 

 ing press for interchange of thought, it is astonishing that 

 such poverty of nomenclature prevails. It would reasonably 



