Remains now to consider the Sword as a weapon for point, a use to which, as its various shapes show, it was applied in the earliest ages instinctively, as it were, before Science taught the superiority of the thrust to the cut. We learn from such hand-thrusting instruments—the awl, gimlet, needle, and dinner-fork—that the straight weapon may be considered a very acute wedge with a method of progression mostly oblique. It is easy to prove that the proper shape for a thrusting-blade is pre-eminently the straight. Fig. 119 shows the foil making a hole exactly its own size. The ‘regulation’ Sword (fig. 120), a shallow curve, opens, when moving in a direct line, about double its own width; a figure which the scymitar (fig. 121) increases to five or six times, with a proportionate loss of depth at the same expenditure of force. This augmented resistance to penetration is one, but only one, of the many difficulties in using a curved blade for a straight thrust. This difficulty probably suggested the ‘curved thrust’ method of pointing which the foil, as opposed to the rapier, has made popular. The point is propelled, not in a straight line, but in the arc of a circle more or less curved to correspond with the blade. The arm makes this cycloidal movement readily enough, but under a disadvantage; as in the cut the space traversed is longer than what is absolutely necessary to reach the object. Moreover, the movement cannot well be applied to the lunge, so as to throw the weight of the body into the attack. Like the ‘thrusting-cut,’ it is more fitted for horseback than for foot. Although doubtless the best way of pointing with a curvilinear blade, in no case is it better than the straight thrust. [Illustration: FIG. 122.—YATAGHAN.] [Illustration: FIG. 123.—ORNAMENTAL YATAGHAN AND SHEATH.] The ‘curved thrust’ so imposed upon Colonel Marey, of the French army, that he proposed in an elaborate work on Swords (Strasburg, 1841) to adopt the Yataghan, whose beautifully curved line of blade coincides accurately with the motion of the wrist in cutting, and which he held to be equally valuable for the point. As a regulation Sword for infantry, it was spoilt by a cheap iron scabbard. As a bayonet it lost all its distinctive excellence: the forward weight, so valuable in cutting with the hand, made it heavy and unmanageable at the end of a musket, and none but the strongest arms could use it, especially when the thrust had to be ‘lanced out.’ Yet it lasted for a quarter of a century, and only in 1875 it was superseded by the triangular weapon attached to the _fusil Gras_.[439] [Heading: _SECTIONS OF THRUSTING-SWORDS._]