EVOLUTION OF GUNS AND RIFLES 
cannon, for this word best describes them, so widely used in the fascinating 
sport of the punt gunner. Colonel Hawker long ago developed and improved 
an art practised of old by dwellers on the coast, and his delightful book 
gives ample details of the guns and methods employed while yet Lymington 
and Poole harbour were the haunt of myriads of wildfowl, already changing 
their habits to meet the persecution inflicted on them. He laments both 
the diminished number and the increasing wildness of the birds in the 
fens. He considered the flint lock to be superior to the early detonator 
for punt guns, and his careful trials showed the importance of fitting some 
sort of buffer to take the recoil of the gun. He first used a rope breeching, 
and then a well -designed spring fitting, a precedent which has been 
followed ever since. Not all his devices were so successful. His big double 
punt gun, designed to do more execution than a single barrel, and the 
wheel carriage, disguised with boughs, on which the punt gun should be 
mounted to bring it within range of fowl on hard ground, have not survived 
their author. Yet Hawker was one of the most experienced and practical 
shooters that ever lived. From him we come by stages to the present day: 
Folkard in the “fifties ” and Sir R. Payne Gallwey in more recent times 
have both dealt exhaustively with the wildfowler’s art. But the drainage 
of fen lands and the multiplication of guns, as well as the increase of their 
deadliness with the march of improvement, have diminished more and 
more the opportunities of the fowler and the use of the big “ scatter-gun ” 
gradually follows suit. 
Of the largest guns of all, used for the biggest of creatures, it is not in 
the present programme to discourse. Harpoon guns are widely used in 
modern whaling; they are, in fact, cannon for use at very short range. 
A modern form of whaling gun carries a harpoon with massive barbs, 
having also an explosive shell in its head. Such a projectile rapidly proves 
fatal to the giants among mammals. 
To get equally good results out of the same weapon with shot and ball 
was long an object for ingenuity. The rifled barrel does not make a satis- 
factory pattern with shot, nor has more than a very partial degree of 
success rewarded endless endeavours to make a bullet fired from a smooth 
barrel rotate so as to maintain a steady flight through the air. The Paradox 
gun, invented by Colonel Fosbery, and produced by Messrs Holland in 1886, 
solved the problem by leaving what is practically a very tight choke in the 
muzzle of the gun, in which deep spiral grooves are rifled. These are 
enough to grip and spin a properly fitting ball, while they do not much 
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