282 The Dog Book 
Galle, or Galleus, and published at Antwerp in 1578. Strada’s lifetime is 
given as 1536-1612, and Galle’s as 1537-1612, and, as there are more than 
one hundred of these sporting scenes, occupying in painting and engraving 
considerable time, to say nothing of other works of art each was engaged 
upon, we may say with confidence that they were painted from 1560 to 1570. 
In the full bound collection there is an important one representing a smooth 
dog resembling the smooth one in the duck-shooting scene, but with a few 
spots on the body. It is standing, with one raised forefoot and is pointing 
at a bevy of quail, over which two men are drawing a net toward the dog. 
Strada painted most of his dogs rather fat and podgy, and this is not 
an exception. A representation of camel shooting on a seashore shows 
two sailors, one with his matchlock resting in the bend of his elbow when 
being fired, while the other kneeling is firing from his shoulder with his left 
elbow on his knee. The latter style is also shown in a deer-shooting scene 
with the stalking horse. Strada never gave a genuine shooting from 
the shoulder without rest, but there is such a one in a small collection of 
smaller prints representing hunting, fishing and fowling from paintings by 
Hans Bol, 1534-1593. These were also engraved in part by Philip Galle, 
and undoubtedly show sport of a little later date than the Strada paintings. 
Some of the guns are shorter in the stock, and in a wolf-hunting scene a 
man standing erect is shooting with one of these from the shoulder, without 
rest, at a wolf attacked by dogs. This small volume was issued at Brabant 
in 1582, and if we give 1575 as a very late date for the painting by Bol it 
throws the Strada paintings fully ten years before that. 
From an excellent article on guns published in the Sporting Magazine 
of 1792, we take the following: “Still the crossbow was continued long 
after the introduction of the arquebuse, and not dropped entirely till toward 
the end of the fifteenth century, when the arquebuse was first brought to the 
perfection of enabling the sportsman to shoot flying. But such was the 
length of time taken to improve this instrument both in its form and use, 
owing to its advocates and enemies, that it was not without the consumma- 
tion of argument in Nicholas Spadoni, a grave Spaniard, the matchlock 
was finally proscribed and the decided superiority awarded to the springlock’ 
and flint. They must have been, indeed, the most awkward kind of locks 
imaginable, if some people could reasonably plead for the quickness of 
discharge by the matchlocks in preference to them.” . 
The engravings referred to show Continental sports, and we have those 
