and on the maps, is its
unfortunate designation--relapses into virtuous repose.

The implement employed at these rural reunions is rarely the
breech-loader, or even the short gun. It promises to hold its ground
for years yet, gradually yielding to the little modern tool. The
essential characteristics of this we have described as they exist
and will probably remain. Variations in the rifling and--where
muzzle-loading is abandoned--in the appliances of the chamber will
continue to be made, as they have heretofore been made without number
numberless. The patterns now fashionable will give place to others,
in their turn to be dropped like a last year's coat. Remington,
Winchester and the rest will retire in favor of new contrivers,
devoted, like them, to the simple task of facilitating the flight of
the leaden arrow with its grooved feather in steel or iron. With them
will rise and fall a parallel series of names on a broader and more
sonorous field--the field of heavy artillery, the ponderous Wiard
being full brother to the liliputian Sharpe. Rifled cannon certainly
present problems far more complicated than the small-arm. They can
by no means be considered, as yet, so near perfection. It is boldly
maintained by many experts, both here and in England, that the
"smashing" power at point-blank range of such smooth-bores as the
Rodman 12-inch and 15-inch is greater than that of the rifle of
the same weight. The question is so closely involved with that of
armor-plates for ships and ports, and that with buoyancy and other
naval requirements, and economy and stability on land, that a long
period must elapse ere the reaching of fixed conclusions. Within the
present generation wooden line-of-battle ships, with sails alone, have
ruled the wave. These have given place to the steam-liners that began
and closed their brief career at Sebastopol and Bomarsund; and the
prize-belt is now borne, among the bruisers of the main, by the mob of
iron-clads, infinitely diverse of aspect and some of them shapeless,
like the geologic monsters that weltered in the primal deep. Which of
these is to triumph ultimately and devour its misshapen kindred, or
whether they are not all to go down before the torpedo, that carries
no gun and fires no shot, is a "survival-of-the-fittest" question to
be solved by Darwins yet to come. But it is tolerably safe to say that
where the best shooting is to be done it will continue to be done with
the conico-cylindr