Delvigne's new gun came into use in 1840. The long matchlocks of the
Arabs had been very worrying to the French in Algiers. It was a common
pastime of the Ishmaelites to pick off the Gauls at a distance which
left Brown Bess helpless. Protruded over an almost inaccessible crag,
the former primitive instrument would plump its ball into the ranks
of the Giaour in the dell below with a precision and an effect hardly
requited by victories in the open field or by the cave-smokings of
His Grace of Malakoff. Delvigne's arm was accordingly supplied to the
Chasseurs d'Orléans, and in their hands served the desired purpose.
The matchlock met its match.

Under M. Delvigne's system, however, the ball was not always well
forced into the grooves. The _tige_, too, made cleaning difficult:
it often got crooked, and it sometimes broke off. A M. Tamisier
did something toward removing the former difficulty by cutting
very shallow grooves on the ball itself. The other called forth the
ingenuity of the now famous Minié, who made his first appearance
in 1847-1848, and whose name has attained the same kind of lethal
immortality with the names of Shrapnell, Congreve and Rodman. M. Minié
abandoned the _tige_ entirely. He scooped out the base of the ball and
inserted into it an iron cup. This cup was driven into the ball by
the explosion, and forced the soft lead into the grooves. The leading
objection to the Minié ball in this form was that the device did its
work too thoroughly. The iron was often driven so deep into the lead
as to tear off the solid point and scatter the whole projectile into
two or three pieces. This mitrailleuse-like distribution of disrupted
spheres or leaden asteroids was obviated by the abandonment of the
iron cup, the powder being left to act on the lead itself. Two or
three channels cut around the neck of the bullet helped to keep