Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: overcoming the difficulty, without being aware of what really occurred. In the autumn of 1902 the author contributed some letters to The County Gentleman, which explained the difficulty; but his discovery, for such it has proved to be, was hotly disputed in a correspondence led by some of the leaders of the gun trade. This was by no means wonderful, although it is disconcerting for a discoverer to be treated as " past hope " when he is so unfortunate as to make a find that can do him no good, but ever since must have saved much in work and patent fees to the gun trade. The accepted view of involuntary pull prior to this discovery was that after the shot from the first barrel, recoil jumped the gun away from the finger, and then the shoulder rebounded the gun forward on to the stiff finger, which, being struck by the trigger, let off the second barrel. The author for some time previous to 1902 had become conscious that this explanation was open to question. However, it was not until he sat down and worked out the times of recoil and finger movement, that he felt safe in challenging so generally accepted a statement. But this calculation proved to him that, so far from rebound causing the unwished-for " let off," the latter occurred in one-twentieth of the time occupied by the recoil backwards. However, the author's powers of persuasion failed to convince everybody, and for this reason the editor of The County Gentleman, with the assistance of Mr. Robertson, of Boss