412 
NATURE 
| Warch 
27 
23, 18771 

anywhere and do anything, &c. &c. You scientific people 
always forget to look at the practical side of things.” 
Now that is just what scientific men don’t forget. No 
man can be really practical unless he is also in his measure 
scientific. But in this matter of sights it may be worth 
while to follow the advice of our imaginary soldier, and 
look more minutely at the practical side of the question, 
What is the test of a good sight? Obviously the best 
sight is that which enables the rifleman most easily to 
judge whether two successive aims are alike, or if they 
differ, to say in what direction and to what extent they 
do so. For this reason the soldier is taught to dis- 
criminate between fine sights, full sights, and half sights, 
according to the quantity of foresight which he allows 
to be visible above the bottom of the V. What he sees 
is an irregular lozenge, and the accuracy of his shoot- 
ing, so far as elevation is concerned, depends upon 
his judging with perfect exactness the length of the 
vertical diagonal of this lozenge. Again, if wind has 
to be allowed for, he must fix in his mind the ap- 
parent distance at which the tip of the foresight should 
be seen on the right or left of the object. The difficulty 
of these eye-adjustments is enormously increased by 
giving him nothing but inclined datum lines from which 
to estimate. The language in which it is customary at 
Hythe to inculcate the method of making allowance for 
wind, curiously illustrates the absurdity of the received 
sight-pattern. The recruit is told that he must “aim at 
nothing to hit something,” a phrase really very happy as 
a description of the difficulty of estimating at the same 
time elevation and lateral allowance with a Government 
riflé. The most practised shots find it by no means easy 
to vary their horizontal allowance for wind without in some 
degree altering their elevation, and all this difficulty is 
quite gratuitous, 
The true test of the value of a system of sighting 
is of course to be applied rifle in hand, but our pic- 
FIC.3. 

tures will show tolerably well what the result or such 
a test would be. Figure 1 is what a man sees when 
he takes an aim with the present military sights. It 
is meant for a half-sight, the lozenge in the middle 
being the portion of foresight visible, and the shading 
being as near a representation as we can give of the 
haze which always more or less blurs the outline of 
the backsight. We have supposed a little wind, and the 
object is therefore seen on one side of the sight, and is as 
nearly level with the tip of it as it can be brought without 
the guidance of any horizontal line. Now suppose the 
rifleman finds that sight correct, and wishesto shoot down a 
second enemy at the same range and under the same 
conditions. He will try to take just the same sort of aim 
again, and Fig. 3isa pretty good approach toit. Probably 
the reader will have to look backwards and forwards 
rather arefully before he can judge whether there is any, 



and how much, discrepancy between Figs. 1 and 3, and if 
(as would be the case in actual practice) Fig. 1 had gone 
out of existence say only a few minutes before Fig. 3 was 
looked at, we doubt very much whether the error would 
be large enough to be discerned at all, and we are sure 
that its amount would not be correctly estimated. 
Now, take the case of rectangular sights such as are 
drawn in Fig. 2. In this, as in Fig. 1, the elevation is 
supposed to be normal—that is, with the horizontal top 
of the foresight level with the top of the backsight below 
the haze. The allowance for wind is exactly the same as 
in Fig. 1, and its amount may be fixed in the memory 
by noting that the object is about twice as far from the 
outer edge of the foresight as it is from the little rect- 
angular notch which marks the middle of it. Having 
looked at this, it would be quite possible to go away for a 
day, and then return and look at Fig. 4, and see at once 
that this latter differs from the former by being a con- 
siderably higher sight with a much larger allowance for 
wind. No error anything like as gross as this could be 
made even by the poorest shot in two successive aims. And 
yet the real differences in elevation and horizontal allow- 
ance between Figs. 2 and 4 are not larger than those 
between Figs. 1 and 3, which cannot be detected or re- 
membered without the greatest difficulty. And this is 
the result simply of substituting rectangular for oblique 
sights. 
‘ All very pretty,” says our soldier, again, “ but how are 
you to get such a sight as you have drawn, on a rifle meant 
to carry a bayonet and to be used in war?” 
We are fortunately able to answer this question. Figs. 
2 and 4 are taken from the actual sights of a rifle pre- 
pared as follows—A London armoury rifle of Government 
pattern was taken ; the knife-edge of the foresight was filed 
clean off, leaving the block, and then a small rectangular 
groove was filed longitudinally in the middle of the block, 
thus leaving the foresight less liable to injury than before. 
FIG. 4, 
Then the sliding-bar was turned upside down, and asquare 
notch filed instead of the triangular V. 
The rifle so altered was rather fitter for rough work than 
before, and it was possible to aim with it and to make 
exact allowance for wind into the bargain. The use of it, 
too, was incomparably easier for a recruitto learn, We 
may add that the result of actual shooting with it has been 
quite conclusive in its favour. And yet the beautiful and 
expensive Henry-Martini is now being turned out with 
sights which neutralise one half of the accuracy of the 
weapon by making accuracy of aim impossible. 
It will cost at least 1,000,000/, to arm our troops with 
Henry-Martinis in lieu of Sniders, and on a moderate 
computation one-third of the gain in accuracy (which may 
be represented by one-third of the cost) is utterly thrown 
away by the defective sighting. 
lf these things were not ascertained facts, it would be 
hard to believe them possible. Is it even yet too late to 
stop the mischief ? i G. W. H. 
