[109] By this time Denmark, Holland, Russia and Sweden had all recognized the possibilities of shell guns, and had adopted them in greater or less degree. By this time, too, France actually possessed more steam war-vessels than we had ourselves.
[110] Simmons: Effects of Heavy Ordnance.
[111] The crossbow was looked upon as a weapon unworthy of a brave man; a prejudice which afterwards prevailed with respect to fire-arms (Hallam: Middle Ages).
[112] The Hon. T. F. Fremantle: The Book of the Rifle.
[113] Le Développement des Armes à Feu, 1870.
[114] In this aspect of the origin of the grooves there is a curious analogy between the rifle-barrel and the drill used in machine tools. In the primitive drill the shank is appreciably less in diameter than the hole cut by the drill, so that the drillings can easily work their way out of the hole. When, however, it was desired to make the shank almost of the same diameter as the hole, so as to form a guide, it was necessary to flute it with two grooves or more to allow the drillings to get away. In the course of its evolution these grooves became spiral.
[115] Quoted in The Book of the Rifle from Schmidt’s Armes à Feu Portatives, 1889.
[116] Delvigne: Notice historique des armes rayées.
[117] Beaufoy: Scloppetaria.
[118] A paragraph in Beaufoy’s Scloppetaria (1808) shows the complete misconception under which its author laboured as to the function of rifling. Just as the air turns a windmill or a shuttlecock (he says), so, after an indented ball quits its rifled barrel the air, forced spirally along its grooves, will cause the ball to turn. In short, he regarded the spiral grooves of a barrel as being of no further utility, with respect to the generating of the rotary motion, than as an easy way of giving the ball the requisite indentations.