AT the last annual dinner of the Chicago Archery Club I was asked to write an article to be published in the Forest and Stream, expressive of my ideas relative to the point of aim.

I am aware of the difficulties which confront one who attempts to change any written or unwritten rule that has been established by many years of traditional usage. This perhaps especially true of archery, because of the sentimentalism interwoven with golden legendary strands, through the time-honored chivalrous deeds of skill told in song and story from the days of Robin Hood, and most dear to every true lover of the art.

We delight to recall the feats of skill of lose early archers, who, it is said, could raise the long bow and let fly a shaft with unerring precision, conscious of nothing but intent to hit the object aimed at upon which their eyes and every thought for the moment was concentrated.

No vulgar mechanical details of exactitudes relative to distance, length of pull, poise of arrow, points of aim, etc., consciously marred thee beauty of those sacred moments when the arrows took their happy flight.

The requisite combination of subconscious movements which entered into those beautiful acts of accuracy and skill, was doubtless that which is experienced to a more or less extent, by all skillful archers of to-day. and which, perhaps, carries the various factors of the act s accurately to their places, as the forces that unconsciously carries the hands and fingers of an accomplished musician accurately to position with no thought to physical detail.

We like to think that the highest art of real archery is a poem, a harmonious combination of movements composed principally of instinctive intuitiveness, and not one which is dependent upon mechanical requirements which we must recognize and carry into effect at each act of shooting. This has taken such hold of our sentimentalities, it is only in recent years that archers have been unashamed to acknowledge that they resorted to certain mechanical ex-pedients to improve the accuracy of their aim.