ARMS. History.— When the naked sav age found himself face to face with the wild beast, hungry and fierce, but not within strik ing distance, he swiftly seized a jagged frag ment of rock from the ground and hurled it with all his force at the blazing eyes before him; then another and another, until the beast, dazed from the unexpected blows, fell back and gave him a chance to escape. At that mo ment the savage had invented arms and am munition. He had found a way to strike a harder blow than the blow of his fist, at a greater distance than the length of his arm, and his brain showed him how to do it. The cave man and his descendants learned the val uable lesson of stone-throwing and it made hunters of them, and so it went on for cen turies. At last, however, there appeared a great inventor—a nameless Edison of his day. He took his girdle of skin and placed a stone in its centre, holding both ends with his right hand. He whirled the girdle twice around his head, then released one end so that the leather strip flew out and the stone shot straight for ward. Here was the first slingman in action. A little practice made expert marksmen, and most of the early races used it for hunting and in war. We find it shown in pictures made many thousands ofyears ago in ancient Egypt and Assyria. We find it in the Roman army, where the slingman was called a We find it in the Bible, where it is written of the tribe of Benjamin: ((Among all these peo ple there were 700 chosen men left-handed; every one could sling a stone at an hair breadth and not miss." Likewise the story of David and Goliath is remembered, when the young shepherd aprevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone)" Slings were used in European armies until nearly 100 years after America was discovered.
A little later we find man armed with his (bow and arrow* as an instrument of war. The cross-bow, the Chinese repeating cross-bow, the ballista and catapult, all played their parts up to the invention of gunpowder, when fire arms, were born, and we have the rapid devel opment of the cannon, the petronel, the hand culverin, the match-lock, the serpentin, the harquebus, the wheel-lock, the Monk's gun and flint-lock.
It is doubtful at what time guns were first used as sporting arms; but early French and Italian works seem to indicate the close of the 14th century. We find a curious illustration in
an old manuscript entitled, Gonne and How to Use IV) dated 1446. This curious sketch is evidently a caricature; but it is suf ficient to show that all firearms were used for game shooting in the early part of the 15th century. We have notices of the same in sev eral records of that century, and by the close of the 16th century the gun seems to have become so general a sporting weapon as to necessitate special regulations in several Eu ropean countries. About 1580, an Italian work informs us, shooting at birds flying and ani mals in motion was first practiced; but this could not have been to any great extent. It was not until the close of the 18th century that shooting on the wing became at all cotn mon. Since that time it has been so univer sally practised as to make shooting at any fixed object with a shot-gun unsportsmanlike.
Breech-Loaders.— Sporting arms may be classed as shot-guns, pistols, carbines and rifles. Muzzle-loaders are but little used at the pres ent time. Most breech-loaders employ the me tallic case cartridge, and are divided into simple breech-loaders and repeaters. The essential parts of all such arms are the barrel, the cham ber, the breech-mechanism, the lock, the stock, the sights and the mountings, and in repeaters, the magazine. If the chamber be made in the piece which closes the breech, commonly called the breech-block, the arm is said to have a movable chamber. The latter has great ad vantages and is generally used. With the fixed chamber the interior of the barrel is divided into two distinct parts, viz., the bore proper or space through which the projectile moves under the influence of the powder and the chamber in which the charge is deposited. The principal parts peculiar to breech-loaders are: (1) The movable breech-block, by which the chamber is opened and closed; (2) the breech frame, upon which the breech-block is mounted and united to the barrel; (3) the chamber, with its recess, to receive the rim of the cartridge; (4) the firing-pin, which transmits the blow of the hammer to the cartridge; (5) the extractor, by which the empty case is removed after fir ing.