The matchlock met its match.

Under M. Delvigne's system, however, the ball was not always well
forced into the grooves. The _tige_, too, made cleaning difficult:
it often got crooked, and it sometimes broke off. A M. Tamisier
did something toward removing the former difficulty by cutting
very shallow grooves on the ball itself. The other called forth the
ingenuity of the now famous Minie, who made his first appearance
in 1847-1848, and whose name has attained the same kind of lethal
immortality with the names of Shrapnell, Congreve and Rodman. M. Minie
abandoned the _tige_ entirely. He scooped out the base of the ball and
inserted into it an iron cup. This cup was driven into the ball by
the explosion, and forced the soft lead into the grooves. The leading
objection to the Minie ball in this form was that the device did its
work too thoroughly. The iron was often driven so deep into the lead
as to tear off the solid point and scatter the whole projectile into
two or three pieces. This mitrailleuse-like distribution of disrupted
spheres or leaden asteroids was obviated by the abandonment of the
iron cup, the powder being left to act on the lead itself. Two or
three channels cut around the neck of the bullet helped to keep
the point in line, and aided at the same time the fastening of the
cartridge. Thus came its final metamorphosis to the buzzing little
torment that has been at intervals for the last twenty years flying
over all the continents and perplexing the nations.

It was not till 1852 that the Enfield rifle was settled on as the
standard weapon of the British army. Machinery and machinists were
imported for its fabrication from the United States, the appliances
of our government armories being copied, and Colonel Bruton, of the
Harper's Ferry Works, employed to set them going. Prior to that time
all firearms of public or private manufacture, in England, had been
made by hand, the interchangeability of all the parts of any given
number of guns being an end accomplished in this country alone. The
advantage of having every corresponding detail of each piece a fac
simile of the same part in all the firelocks of an army must have been
perceived from the time when such weapons were first invented;
and nothing but the most inveterate conservatism, or the steadiest
opposition of that stamp which mobbed threshing-machines and the
spinning-jenny, could have so long staved off its practical adoption.

Once awakened, ho