Introduction. 



for what the skilled workman learns by practice he cannot 

 impart by verbal descriptions, even were he so minded. 

 When hand firearms came into general use the trade guilds 

 were already firmly established, and a separate guild, that 

 of gunmakers, was not possible in all centres, becavise the 

 existing guilds of the smiths and the carpenters divided the 

 work between them, and were jealous of any interference 

 with their privileges. As the " art and mystery " of 

 gunmaking was not recognised until the end of the 

 seventeenth century, and as arms were considered national 

 in the sense that their manufacture could be improved and 

 their form changed without incurring the enmity of manu- 

 facturing corporations, firearms developed quickly. Cataneo 

 wrote a treatise informing how the processes of manufacture 

 should be carried on, Bossi told how to improve the prin- 

 ciple of construction, and Jacquinet showed how the finished 

 weapon should be ornamented ; all before any Gunmakers' 

 Company was chartered in England, and when the Suhl 

 gunmakers were petitioning for incorporation. Not that 

 the inventor's lot was any more happy in the seventeenth 

 century than in the nineteenth. Poor Bossi, who appears 

 to have been a genius and determined upon perfecting the 

 double-barrelled gun, started from his native Rome to try 

 his fortune in Flanders, even then a centre of the firearms 

 industry. His success there appears to have been poor, 

 for he subsequently tried Paris and other centres, and the 

 double gun remained an unappreciated invention. 



Quite apart from these writers of treatises upon firearms 

 from the military standpoint, there remain to be con- 

 sidered the champions of the gun as a sporting weapon. 

 Although, as Sidney Smith states, the tenth Muse is 

 courted in this country more assiduously than in any other, 

 and although the earliest known manuscript in the English 

 language is upon a sporting topic, and the first " boke " 



