Early Spaniels and Setters 93 



kept covered until about to be used, when the cover had to be removed by 

 hand. In front of this was a Hghted fuse which, when the trigger was pulled, 

 fell back into the priming-pan, igniting the powder and firing the piece. All 

 this was very cumbersome and was only used when it was impossible to 

 adopt some other plan of capturing or killing the game. The snaphaunce 

 was the first of the flint-locks, being that piece in its original state. The 

 idea was the flint-and-steel gun, but it could not be operated entirely by the 

 trigger and the cock. It was a Spanish invention which had a rival in the 

 wheel-lock used mainly in Germany and the north of France. The snap- 

 haunce being much the simpler and handier weapon, survived until the flint- 

 lock was invented, about the middle of the seventeenth century, while this 

 book we have quoted from was first pubHshed in 1621. 



There was much opposition to the introduction of the flint-lock, and it 

 was well into the eighteenth century before it was adopted by the armies 

 of western Europe. This new weapon, with its quicker firing, though slow 

 compared with the instantaneous work of the breechloader upon pulling 

 the trigger, opened up a vastly larger field for the sportsman and made 

 shooting from the shoulder without rest possible, as well as shooting on the 

 wing. In water-fowl shooting the snaphaunce with its murderous load was 

 only fired into the thick of the water-fowl when bunched on the water. 



Some misconception seems to exist as to time shooting on the wing 

 became the custom in England, owing to the publication of a book on the 

 "Art of Shooting Flying" about the year 1800, but that book had nothing 

 to do with the introduction of this style of shooting. William Henry Scott 

 in his "British Field Sports," London, 1818, writes as follows in the chapter 

 on shooting: 



" It has been advanced by several of our sporting writers, that to shoot 

 flying is almost a novelty and that the practice is scarcely thirty or forty 

 years old. I can only say that no such fact tallies with my recollection, 

 which extends to a retrospect of about five and fifty years (1763) for I was 

 a very young attendant at shooting parties and partial to the use of the gun, 

 although for causes not necessary to detail never attained any eminence 

 as a shot. At the period referred to, all sportsmen within the narrow circle 

 of my view, were accustomed to shoot flying precisely as their successors 

 now are; and he would at that time have been viewed as a sorry sports- 

 man indeed, who should have gone into the field only to aim at sitting 

 marks. No such drivelling practice was even dreamed of, and there were 



