the creation of gunfire. Long before guns, gunpowder had been used explosively, dynamite style. The use of gunpowder for the propelling of missiles in trajectories waited for the coming of perspective in the arts. This liaison of events between technology and the arts may explain a matter that has long puzzled anthropologists. They have repeatedly tried to explain the fact that non-literates are generally poor shots with rifles, on the grounds that, with the bow and arrow, proximity to game was more important than distant accuracy, which was almost impossible to achieveٛ hence, say some anthropologists, their imitation of hunted beasts by dressing in skins to get close to the herd. It is also pointed out that bows are silent, and when an arrow missed, animals rarely fled. If the arrow is an extension of the hand and the arm, the rifle is an extension of the eye and teeth. It may be to the point 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 the discovery of lineal perspective in the arts. Navigators took a long time to accept the possibility of space as uniform, connected, and continuous. Today in physics, as in painting and sculpture, progress consists in giving up the idea of space as either uniform, continuous, or connected. Visuality has lost its primacy.