112 MANUAL FOR YOUNG SPORTSMEN. 
States, owing partly to the disappearance of those species 
of game against which it was employed. 
In the European armies the soldier’s rifle, though 
effective at long ranges, was ill-finished, clumsy, and not by 
any means a weapon with which to allow men, much less to 
teach them, to become first-rate shots. The first move in 
the right direction was the heavy British two-grooved 
military rifle with the belted ball. Its range was found to 
be what was then thought immense, its precision great, 
and it was an available, manageable, telling, and killing 
weapon. 
As a sporting piece, it still to a certain degree holds 
its own, though it has one bad fault—a fatal one for troops 
in active warfare—that it clogs in rapid firing, and soon 
becomes so foul as to render it impossible to load. 
This in turn was superseded by the Minie rifle, used 
by the French chasseurs de Vincennes, the principle of 
which is duplex. First, it contains a hollow projection, 
sharp-pointed, running from the base of the breech per- 
pendicularly into the chamber, which bursts the cartridge 
when it is driven into it, and through which the igniting 
power of the cap is carried directly into the centre of the 
charge. Secondly, the ball is so contrived as to expand, 
after the impulse is conveyed to it, fill the grooves of the 
barrel, and cut its way out, instead of merely holding its 
way out by means of the cuts made in it, as it was forced 
down in loading. 
This weapon has made a complete revolution in the 
art of war. The Minie rifle executes with such precision 
at such ranges as to render all other fire-arms useless. A 
