Up to the middle of last century our soldiers were armed with the flint-lock musket known as “Brown Bess,” a smooth-bore barrel 3/4-inch in diameter, thirty-nine inches long, weighing with its bayonet over eleven pounds. The round leaden bullet weighed an ounce, and had to be wrapped in a “patch” or bit of oily rag to make it fit the barrel and prevent windage; it was then pushed home with a ramrod on to the powder-charge, which was ignited by a spark passing from the flint into a priming of powder. How little its accuracy of aim could be depended upon, however, is proved by the word of command when advancing upon an enemy, “Wait till you see the whites of their eyes, boys, before you fire!” In the year 1680 each troop of Life Guards was supplied with eight rifled carbines, a modest allowance, possibly intended to be used merely by those acting as scouts. After this we hear nothing of them until in 1800 the 95th Regiment received a 20-bore muzzle-loading rifle, exchanged about 1835 for the Brunswick rifle firing a spherical bullet, an improvement that more than doubled its effective range. The companies so armed became known as the Rifle Brigade. At last, in 1842, the old flint-lock was superseded for the whole army by the original percussion musket, a smooth-bore whose charge was exploded by a percussion cap made of copper. [That this copper had some commercial value was shown by the rush of “roughs” to Aldershot and elsewhere upon a field-day to collect the split fragments which strewed the ground after the troops had withdrawn.] Soon afterward the barrel was rifled and an elongated bullet brought into use. This missile was pointed in front, and had a hollowed base so contrived that it expanded immediately the pressure of exploding gases was brought to bear on it, and thus filled up the grooves, preventing any windage. The one adopted by our army in the year 1852 was the production of M. Minié, a Frenchman, though an expanding bullet of English invention had been brought forward several years before. Meanwhile the Prussians had their famous needle-gun, a breech-loading rifled weapon fired by a needle attached to a sliding bolt; as the bolt is shot forward the needle pierces the charge and ignites the fulminate by friction. This rifle was used in the Prusso-Austrian war of 1866 some twenty years after its first inception, and the French promptly countered it by arming their troops with the Chassepôt rifle, an improved edition of the same principle. A piece which could be charged and fired in any position from five to seven times as fast as the muzzle-loader, which the soldier had to load standing, naturally caused a revolution in the infantry armament of other nations.