most untrained as in the most thoroughly disciplined organ. This may be
questioned, and it is agreed on all hands that the power of multifarious
perception and rapid discrimination may be immensely increased by
well-directed practice. [Footnote: Skill in marksmanship, whether with
firearms or with other projectile weapons, depends more upon the
training of the eye than is generally supposed, and I have often found
particularly good shots to possess an almost telescopic vision. In the
ordinary use of the rifle, the barrel is guided by the eye, but there
are sportemen who fire with the butt of the gun at the hip. In this
case, as in the use of the sling, the lasso, and the bolas, in hurling
the knife (see Babinet, Lectures, vii., p. 84), in throwing the
boomerang, the javelin, or a stone, and in the employment of the
blowpipe and the bow, the movements of the hand and arm are guided by
that mysterious sympathy which exists between the eye and the unseeing
organs of the body. "Some men wonder whye, in casting a man's eye at the
marke, the hand should go streighte. Surely if he considered the nature
of a man's eye he would not wonder at it: for this I am certaine of,
that no servaunt to his maister, no childe to his father, is so
obedient, as every joynte and peece of the bodye is to do whatsover the
eye biddes."--Roger Ascham, Taxophilus, Book ii.

In shooting the tortoises of the Amazon and its tributaries, the Indians
use an arrow with a long twine and a float attached to it. Ave-Lallemant
(Die Benutzung der Palmen am Amazonenstrom, p. 32) thus describes their
mode of aiming: "As the arrow, if aimed directly at the floating
tortoise, would strike it at a small angle and glance from its fiat and
wet shell, the archers have a peculiar method of shooting. They are able
to calculate exactly their own muscular effort, the velocity of the
stream, the distance and size of the tortoise, and they shoot the arrow
directly up into the air, so that it falls almost vertically upon the