ispensable requisites for
the soldier's use. In the English and our own service, the Enfield and
Springfield rifled muskets have been fixed upon as presenting the
nearest attainable approach to perfection in all the desirable elements
of a military rifle.

It is out of the question to look for any such nice work with these
tools as our best amateur riflemen are constantly in the habit of
performing with the heavy thick-barrelled American rifle. The short
Enfield is found to shoot better than the long, owing to the increased
"spring" of the long, thin barrel of the latter; and the English
themselves are becoming aware that they have carried the point of
reducing the weight too far, and their best gun-makers are now insisting
upon the fact which General Jacobs told them years ago,--that a "heavy
conical ball cannot be used effectively from a long, thin barrel like
that of the Enfield rifle, which is liable to great vibration."

The Enfield rifle, however, is a long step in advance of the old
smooth-bored musket, concerning which a veteran British officer has
declared his opinion that "a man might sit at his ease in an armchair
all day long while another at two hundred yards' distance was blazing
away at him with a brown Bess, on the sole condition that he should, on
his honor, aim exactly at him at every shot." _Per contra_ to this,
may be stated the fact, mentioned by Lord Raglan in his despatches, that
at Balaklava a Russian battery of two guns was silenced by the skill in
rifle-shooting of a single officer, (Lieutenant Godfrey,) who,
approaching under cover of a ravine within six hundred yards, and having
his men hand him their Enfield rifles in turn, actually picked off the
artillerymen, one after another, till there were not enough left to
serve the guns, and this in spite of the storm of shot and shell which
they poured around him in reply, he being under no necessity of exposing
a larger target than his head and shoulders for them to aim at.

A trustworthy breech-loading rifle has long been a _desideratum_
with military men; but nothing has yet been produced which offers
sufficient advantages, or seems sufficiently free from objections, to
authorize its introduction as anything more than an experiment. In fact,
the special object of a breech-loading gun--that of enabling its owner
to deliver his fire with greater rapidity--is found in actual service to
be an objection: the soldier being tempted, in the excitement