FIREARMS 287 



sights thereafter. Then think of the unaccus- 

 tomed absence of smoke ; of having no longer, 

 after a shot in the damp, hanging mists of early 

 morning, to peer anxiously through the smoky 

 curtain beyond which, for all you knew to the 

 contrary, an enraged beast might be in the act of 

 furiously charging. No, the introduction of cor- 

 dite marked an epoch as important in its way as 

 those which transformed flintlock into percussion, 

 or the insertion of the charge from the muzzle to 

 the breech. 



But we have advanced so far along the road 

 towards perfection in firearms that many have 

 perhaps overlooked the fact that what led to the 

 crowning triumph of the gunmaker's art which is 

 placed in our hands to-day was not the study of 

 rifling or barrel construction, but the perfecting, 

 after years of heart-breaking experiment, of the 

 modern elongated bullet. The first really suc- 

 cessful bullet for fairly long ranges was, 1 suppose, 

 the old Martini -450. It was as superior to the 

 Snider, which it practically put out of business, 

 as was the latter to the projectile used in the old 

 Brown Bess. By its apparently disproportionate 

 length it was not only more satisfactorily gripped 

 by the barrel than was the shorter bullet, but 

 enabled considerable and important modifications 

 to be made in the rifling itself. Since it made 

 its appearance we have had all sorts of extra- 

 ordinary bullets invented, some almost as long 

 as a waistcoat-pocket pencil, some pointed and 

 some hollow-pointed, some copper-capped and 

 some lead-nosed, but never have any of these 



