The Times' correspondent in Paris affirms that the French have
at length discovered a perfect rifle, and a new and more powerful kind of powder. This powder explodes itself so completely that it is smokeless, and discharges the bullet so strongly that it will pierce thick iron at a distance of "several thousand metres," and "break down defences," presumably of masonry, nearly two miles away. The German Army, he main- tains, must be similarly armed, and this will take three years, as the machinery for making the Tramond rifle exists only in France. This is a little poetical. The force of the new system consists in the powder, not the rifle, and the secret of the powder once discovered, its manufacture will take rather weeks than years. Moreover, there are sharp limits in actual warfare to the utility of an excessively long range. The places are few at which men can engage each other with effect two or three miles away, and the supply of ammunition is not unlimited. Indeed, there are experienced soldiers who doubt whether magazine-rifles, except in the hands of picked troops, will not prove a disadvantage. The temptation, when under fire, to fire fast is too much for most soldiers.
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