AMMUNITION 



time has not yet arrived for us to have a smokeless 

 X powder as regular in its action and as little affected by 

 heat as black powder was, neither have we as free an igniting 

 powder, which is of less moment. 



Nitro powders have greatly improved of recent years, and 

 would doubtless have continued the progress, but they have 

 been brought up, and to a standstill, in the last two or three 

 years by a sort of trade agreement, or an invention of 

 "standard" loading, which may be supposed to have had its 

 origin in the wholesale cartridge trade, since it is impossible 

 that it can be good for sportsmen, or for those who try to fit 

 shooters with their personal requirements, or, in other words, 

 try to load a sportsman's gun according to the individual 

 requirements of gun and man. 



We are still in the dark ages of " pressure " testing, or trying 

 the strength of powders by the work they do upon plugs 

 inserted through the walls of testing guns, and, outside, in 

 contact with lead or other metal that the explosion, in moving 

 the plugs, crushes. In doing this the powder-gas does " work " 

 which would be correctly measurable in foot-tons, but is 

 supposed to be measured in static pounds, which is similar to 

 dropping a weight upon a scale balance and mistaking the 

 weight for the work done by the drop. For instance, if we 

 drop a pound weight a foot on to a scale balance, the work it 

 does is equal to one foot-pound. But if we place it on the 

 scale gently, it will just balance one pound on the other side. 

 One is weight and the other is energy, which are not com- 

 parative terms. Yet in testing powders the fashion is to take 



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