Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ON SHOOTING. The day which introduces these pages to the reader's eye will also drop the curtain upon the English shooting season of 1867?68. From the second day of February until the twelfth day of the following August, the feathered game of these islands will regain and enjoy unconscious immunity from those deadly missiles, which the breech-loaders of Purday and his multitudinous professional brethren drive with such accuracy and force through the spangled plumage of grouse, pheasant, and partridge. It seems, therefore, no inappropriate moment to canvass the effects produced by the almost universal abandonment among British sportsmen of guns loaded at the 'muzzle, and the adoption in their stead of guns loaded at the breech. This substitution of weapons has been, as our sporting readers are well aware, a slow and gradual process. Great and now acknowledged as is the superiority of the breech-loader over the muzzle-loader, it was found to be no easy matter to induce middle-aged and elderly sportsmen among us to abandon, in a moment thedetonating or percussion system with which the fame of Osbaldeston, Captain Ross, George Anson, Lord Huntingfield, and many other celebrated marksmen, both dead and living, is inseparably identified. No sudden disclosure of the inferiority of their weapon flashed conviction upon the minds of British sportsmen, and taught them, as the battle of Sadowa taught soldiers all over the world, that percussion-caps and muzzle-loaders were no less a thing of the past than flint and steel, or bows and arrows. But even if the merits of the breech-loader had been far more conspicuously manifest and incontrovertible than they are, nothing is more illustrative of the characteristic conservatism of our own upper classes than the tenacity with which they cling to...
Synopsis
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