THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
affect the distribution of a charge of small shot. Other devices for the same 
purpose, such as the cutting of extremely shallow grooving in the barrel, 
have since been developed by other makers. The result is, that the sports- 
man going abroad can provide himself with a double 12 bore, a little heavier 
perhaps than an ordinary gun, which will serve for the game of jungle and 
plain, from stag to snipe. This is in many cases a great convenience to the 
man who is not specializing in big game or antelope shooting. 
Many were in old days the attempts to supersede gunpowder by some 
other means of projecting missiles. Thus, some sensation was created 
in the middle of the nineteenth century by Perkins’s steam gun, which fired 
balls under pressure from steam. A number of shots could thus be fired 
in rapid succession so long as the supply of steam lasted, but their velocity 
and effect were by no means comparable to those given by gunpowder, 
and the want of portability of a generator for the steam was another fatal 
drawback. Compressed air has long been a favourite source of projectile 
power. The air gun is said to have been invented in Nuremberg so long 
ago as 1560. Of late years the air rifle, carrying a small slug or bullet, 
has been much improved, and is an excellent instructional weapon. In 
such rifles a fresh charge of air is compressed for each shot, by the process 
of opening the gun. In the eighteenth century air guns were often used, 
a copper reservoir underneath the gun being filled by means of a foot 
pump to a considerable pressure, and sufficing to fire perhaps twenty shots. 
Air guns, however, suffered from lack of power, and from restricted range, 
drawbacks inherent in the system. The absence of noise was in many 
cases an advantage. Colonel Thornton took with him on his sporting tour 
to France in 1802 his best guns, rifles, and pistols, as well as an air rifle; 
with this he made a great impression by killing a wild boar at 50 yards, 
and afterwards, from the saddle of a horse at a trot, putting a ball through 
Colonel Marigny’s hat, placed in a tree 60 yards off. Following such feats, 
the killing with the air gun of a roe, and, at the manufactory of firearms 
at Versailles, shooting within an inch of the mark at 93 yards, verge 
on the commonplace. But with the rapid improvement of guns and rifles, 
the air gun soon disappeared, so far as its use in the field is concerned. 
Here must be ended this survey of the development of sporting fire- 
arms, of necessity a brief and incomplete account of one of the most fas- 
cinating chapters in the story of the evolution of human arts. The interest 
of weapons is for some men due to the close contact with Nature which 
they can bring; for others, to the delight of adventurous wandering in the 
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