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 lighted 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 published 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 de 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: 
“Tt 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 ashot. 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 
