to remark that it was the literate American colonists who were 
first to insist on a rifled barrel and improved gunsights. They 
improved the old muskets, creating the Kentucky rifle. It was 
the highly literate Bostonians who outshot the British regulars. 
Marksmanship is not the gift of the native or the woodsman, 
but of the literate colonist. So runs this argument that links 
gunfire itself with the rise of perspective, and with the 
extension of the visual power in literacy. In the Marine Corps it 
has been found that there is a definite correlation between 
education and marksmanship. Not for the nonliterate is our 
easy selection of a separate, isolated target in space, with the 
rifle as an extension of the eye.

     If gunpowder was known long before it was used for guns, 
the same is also true of the use of the lodestone or magnet. Its 
use in the compass for lineal navigation had, also, to wait for