Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/505

Rh various forms of "harkebus" and "arquobuse" in the different languages. Presently the tube, growing still lighter as the improvement ill the manufacture of powder enabled the weight of the ball to be continually reduced, was laid in a stock similar to that of the famous Genoese cross-bow, and a priming-pan was placed at the vent. A little later a still more valuable improvement was made by attaching to the rear end of the barrel a piece of iron shaped like the letter S, and celled a "serpent." The upper end of this carried the tip of a lighted rope-match into the priming-pan when the lower end was moved by the finger. When a trigger and springs were subsequently added, the Man on Foot had the historic "matchlock," with which ho fought for two and a half centuries.

Thenceforward the march of improvement was steady and at an accelerating pace. The "hand-gonne" gained continual access of power over the Man on Horseback, and as continually its use became more familiar to the people at large. By singular concatenations, which some people are fond of terming "providential dispensations," the men advocating the best ideas got hold of the best improved guns and had the most of them.

In 1477 the Swiss, who had grown so self-confident that they did not hesitate to descend from their mountains to attack the Men on Horseback on the plains, came down from the passes of the Vosges Mountains carrying from six thousand to ten thousand of these firelocks, and at Granson, Morat, and Nancy, literally destroyed off the face of the earth the arrogant Charles the Bold and his rapacious Burgundian chivalry. Guns which combined the improvements of another half-century enabled the Spanish footmen to smite the French chevaliers hip and thigh at Pavia in 1525, where Francis I "lost everything but honor," and the Spanish infantry became the first in Europe, a position it held for nearly a century, until, as the instrument of ecclesiastical tyranny in the Netherlands, it was defeated by the superior guns and tactics of the Dutch infantry under Maurice of Nassau.

A few decades later the use of paper cartridges by the Swedish musketeers gave them an advantage which greatly aided Gustavus Adolphus to widen the horizon of Liberty by his successful warfare against the hordes of civil and religious despotism. Nearly simultaneously firelocks in the hands of Cromwell's superb foot-soldiery were preaching irresistible arguments on the Rights of Man to Charles I's cavaliers.

The mediæval Man on Horseback may now be said to have permanently disappeared from the field of battle. Granson, Morat, and Pavia had showed him of how little avail it was for him to cover every inch of his own body and that of his horse with the best steel, and he began stripping it off, to gain celerity of movement under the dreadful fire. By the end of the seventeenth century it was all gone but the helmet and breastplate, and these were not worn by him, but by