It is about the same time that we find a British writer, who had witnessed the efficiency of the rifle as a companion implement to the axe in pushing European settlement on this continent, saying, “Whatever state shall thoroughly comprehend the nature and advantages of rifle-pieces, and, having facilitated and completed their construction, shall introduce into its armies their general use, with a dexterity in the management of them, will by this means acquire a superiority which will almost equal anything that has been done at any time by the particular excellence of any one kind of firearms, and will perhaps fall but little short of the wonderful effects which histories relate to have been formerly produced by the first inventors of firearms.”

This was written in 1748, at which time the rifle was used only by the hunters of the Alps and the hunters of the American backwoods; the latter having doubtless derived it from the former through German immigration.  Bull’s conservatism, however, was in the way.  The lessons of Fort Duquesne, of Saratoga and of New Orleans were successively wasted on him.  He did arm one regiment, the Ninety-fifth, with this weapon toward the close of the last century, but for a long time it stood alone in the royal service.  Austria had previously maintained some corps of Tyrolese Jaegers.  The French fought through all the wars of their Revolution without having recourse to the rifle, save in the campaign of 1793.  It is singular that the keen eye of Napoleon failed to detect its value, especially when we note the use he made of light troops.  The fate of Nelson justifies the idea that a large body of good riflemen might have changed the issue of Trafalgar.

Curiously enough, the French, who were the last to realize the merits of the rifle, were the first to institute those improvements which caused, within the present generation, its universal substitution for the musket.  The Gallic pioneer was Delvigne, but his first improvements proved, as Pat might say, no improvement at all.  The inconvenience of slow loading was the most obvious.  Delvigne’s remedy was to give the ball increased windage; in other words, to diminish its diameter comparatively with that of the bore.  The ball thus went easily down to the shoulders of the chamber containing the charge.  Arrived there, a smart rap with the ramrod moulded it to the grooves.  But it also flattened the top, and forced the bottom partly into the chamber.  Thus misshapen at birth, the bullet was cast upon the world to an erratic and fruitless career.

In 1828 a second Frenchman took the tube in hand.  Colonel Thouvenin abandoned the chamber, and filled up much of the place it had occupied with a cylindrical steel pillar, or tige, which projected from the breech-plug longitudinally into the barrel.  This formed a little anvil whereon the bullet was to be beaten into the grooves.  But the bottom was flattened, and the powder acted only on the periphery of the ball instead of the centre, tending thus to give it an oblique direction.