living rock, and the Pelasgians—or who?—had
built their Cyclopæan walls wherever they had had
the chance, yet Archimedes always stands first
on the list of mechanical discoverers, as if the
world had never known crank or pulley till he
made both, and had never raised a stone bigger than
a man's hand. But we must not forget that even
Archimedes stood upon the shoulders of the past.
Well! Archimedes was no martyr. His Eureka,his
boast about the world and the lever, were household
words in every Greek mouth; his screw is
one of the principal motors of the present day;
and his catapults and burning-glasses, his balistæ
and the Galley of Heiro received their due
honours then, and remain unsurpassed even yet.
The Great Eastern is not equal to that Galley
of Heiro, with its temples and its baths, its
storehouses, water tanks, and six hundred A.B.s
sitting down to fish and flour in the
forecastle. Honoured by his sovereign, respected
by the people, revered by posterity, the ghost of
brave old Archimedes, wandering palely on the
banks of the Styx, has no reason to complain of
the injustice of humanity.

No one was hung, drawn, or quartered for
the magnet; only Columbus, when the needle
varied in the American Atlantic, had to
improvise a theory to save, perhaps, his
life from the mutinous hands of his terrified
sailors. Whether the Chinese, to whom the
honour of the discovery belongs, have a martyr
magnetiser, like their martyr potter Pousa—
now a god, or something like—we do not
know; but, according to all accounts, their
Magnetis Mountain, which played Sindbad such
a sorry trick, has made martyrs and victims
enough. Printing made a martyr, in a small
way, of poor Guttenberg, who, what with debt
(he spent the whole of a large private fortune in
bringing his movable blocks to perfection),
political frays, the ill-will of the priests, and the
enmity of the guild of writers, had but a
troubled life of it. But though he was
persecuted, and though Faust was held as nothing
better than lieutenant and vice-regent of
the devil, all the early printers were not so
reviled. Old Caxton was honoured as he
deserved; and cost the parish good hard money
for the "iiij torches, and the belle used at his
bureying." Guttenberg's small napkin-press-like
printing machine has been slightly distanced
now by Applegarth's machines of eight cylinders,
which print twelve thousand impressions of the
Times per hour; by Messrs. Hoe's of ten cylinders,
which print twenty thousand in the hour;
and by that other American monster, which can
print twenty-two thousand double impressions
in the same time. Little did the good old
German philosopher and enthusiast dream of
where his invention would extend when he first
hewed out his wooden movable blocks.

Of gunpowder and its discoverers we need
not speak. It has had its martyrs by the
million, and is altogether too ferocious a
compound for us to meddle with. Torricelli
and Pascal, Réaumur and Fahrenheit, with
their barometers and thermometers, are
pleasanter subjects to consider; so is Guericke, with
his air-pump; so are all the inventors of the
various diving-bells, by which human beings can
go down among the sea-nymphs and the coral-
roots, and crawl through the mazes of brown,
green, and purple weed, growing in tufted
bowers among the arches of the wrecks. The
latest of these diving-bells is the American
Nautilus, where the ballast or descending power is
water, and where the air for breathing is
condensed. This American Nautilus seems to be
about the greatest success yet made in the
diving-bell department, allowing men to remain
under water longer than any other contrivance
hitherto devised, and with less risk of accident
or suffocation. For the race of automata we
confess to little absolute sympathy; though,
relatively, both as furtherances to the science of
pure mechanics, and as examples of skill and
ingenuity, they are not without considerable
value. They are among the earliest and most
universal creations of man. India, China, and
Japan, all have them in some or other form;
Egypt and Greece both dealt largely in them
for their mysteries and initiations. Greece,
indeed, patronised them for pleasure, witness the
Wooden Region, made by Archytas of Tarentum;
the Homeric Tripods; the Venuses, that
had to be tied up at night to prevent their
rambling about unbidden; and other things,
which will readily be found by classical scholars
not afraid of "roots." Then there were various
and sundry automata in the Dark Ages; Friar
Bacon's Brazen Head was one, and the thirty
years' similar labour of Albertus Magnus was
another—that head, which, when it began to
speak, Thomas of Aquinas broke to pieces,
under fear and pain of the devil, as usual. Poor
Alex of Provence fared badly with his invention.
He had discovered the fact that two
instruments tuned in unison were what we should
now term harmoniously sympathetic. He made
an automaton skeleton, placed it in the window,
put a guitar in its hand, and played another
instrument, tuned in unison and set at a distance.
The automaton skeleton moved its fingers; sounds
were heard from the guitar; the populace
believed it was all a work of magic and witchcraft;
and poor Alex and the skeleton were burnt
together, by command of the parliament. This
was in 1674—think, reader! Not yet two
hundred years ago! Vaucanson's Duck was a grand
triumph over all sorts of difficulties. Every
bone was anatomically correct, and the duck did
all that a live duck should do: eat, drank,
dabbled with its beak in the true, quick, duck-
like manner, moved its wings, and even quacked.
It did more than this, too; but we need not
particularise further. Droz the elder, made a writing
boy; Droz the younger, a pianoforte boy; and
Droz the elder got caught by the Spanish
Inquisition, and narrowly escaped with his life. It
was a dangerous amusement in those days to
fashion automata that could, by any possibility,
be supposed to be imps or familiars; and as
even a pet dog or a tame toad might bring a
person to the stake as a necromancer, what