Taking twenty-five as the average number of pupils that could be, with full advantage, under daily practice, and four days as the period for completing their instruction, one hundred and fifty might be thus finished in the twenty-four (as an average) working days of each month, a battalion of about six hundred men in four months, and consequently twelve hundred men in the eight temperate months (from, about the 1st of March to the 1st of November) in each year. To complete, therefore, the British army on home service in one year, there would be required about forty such establishments scattered throughout the United Kingdom, and for the volunteer rifle corps and militia about fifty more. After the year of theoretical instruction, they would remain as most useful for freer practice. The expense would be, the cost of the land, which (considering that strips of worthless soil, or of government ground, might in many instances be procured gratis) should not exceed five hundred pounds the station; and light fencing, the butt, targets, sheds, ball-proof sentry-boxes, rests, and a small house for the marker in charge of the ground, which might average four hundred pounds more. In all nine hundred pounds for each establishment as a permanent outlay, or about thirty-six thousand pounds for the regular army, and forty-five thousand pounds for the volunteer rifle corps and militia. The markers might be military pensioners, with a small addition to their pay, and the instructors retired officers or non-commissioned officers, with a similar allowance. Many from these classes would be well calculated for such duties, and would enter with spirit into them. To give complete success to an appeal to the nation for the expenditure thus required, notorious facts, added to a widely-acknowledged principle, mentioned in the first edition of this treatise, should be sufficient: “Every _reasonable outlay_ towards the maintenance of national military efficiency _is true economy_; and _the neglect of it, real extravagance_.”—(“Essentials,” Art. 2nd, Correct Firing.) The notorious facts referred to are, that the marvellous inventive spirit of the age has, at one bound, made military efficiency dependent, in a _super-eminent degree, on skill in rifle practice_, and that other nations, sensitively alive to the circumstance, are devoting to it immense methodical attention.[18] Footnote 17: Made carefully, with soldiers of the 52nd Regiment, on a retired sea-beach in British North America, in the years 1825-6. Footnote 18: See, among other proofs, “Instruction sur le Tir, par Ordre du Ministre de la Guerre,” Paris, 1848; and “Projet d’Instruction sur le Tir,” Paris, 1850. SHORT OBSERVATIONS UPON DRESS AND APPOINTMENTS.