"The
bridge was built," as the old sapper told his commander, "before them
picters" (the engineer's designs) "came." The arrow-head describes, as
it whirls through the air, a solid varying from a cone only so far as
its edges vary from straight lines. This variation serves to blend the
cone with the cylinder formed by the revolution of the arrow-head and
the feather. The difference in length between the ball and the arrow
is due to the necessities of the case. The least practicable length
is best for both. The office of the spirally-wound feather in
communicating a rotary motion, and thereby balancing, by an opposite
force, the tendency of the missile to swerve in any given direction,
is fulfilled by the spiral groove of the rifle. Of course, the
ordinary smooth musket is unfitted to the conico-cylindrical ball.
Discharged from such a barrel, there being nothing to keep the point
in the direction of its flight, it soon tumbles over, like an arrow
without a feather, and strikes wide of the mark.
Delvigne's new gun came into use in 1840. The long matchlocks of the
Arabs had been very worrying to the French in Algiers. It was a common
pastime of the Ishmaelites to pick off the Gauls at a distance which
left Brown Bess helpless. Protruded over an almost inaccessible crag,
the former primitive instrument would plump its ball into the ranks
of the Giaour in the dell below with a precision and an effect hardly
requited by victories in the open field or by the cave-smokings of
His Grace of Malakoff.
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