tion of the great human family are unable to use pens, but are trained to the handling of these shooting and stabbing irons used in great and small wars, and in manly recreations in cruelty to animals. The musket, sporting gun, and rifle have come to their present character by an inverse process and development. They have grown down and from the monster-mouthed cannon, instead of the cannon growing up from them into its huge dimensions. The cannon is said to have been made first in the middle of the fourteenth century at Liege, a town that armed half of Europe for several centuries with all sorts of weapons and armour against weapons. It was a huge, rude machine for shooting large stones at an enemy. They were first used by the English against the Scots in 1327, and by them against the French at the battle of Cressy, in 1346. It is stated that some of them were large enough to discharge a mass of stones weighing 1,200 pounds. They were great tubes of iron plates hooped together by large iron rings "shrunk on" when hot. The first we read of a hand-gun is in 1471, when Edward IV landed with 300 Flemings, armed with the miniature cannon, which the Germans had elaborated to a considerable capacity of mischief. It varied, however, but little from the cannon except in size. It was a simple barrel, mounted on a straight stock, with an uncovered
