104

Mechanical Speculations

[Book I.

lates. 2. By means of birds, for as he quaintly says, “If there be sucha great ruck in Madagascar , as Marcus Polus the Vcnetian mentions, thefeathers in whose wings are twelve feet long, which can scoop up a horseand his rkier, or an elephant, as our lutes do a mouse ; why then, ’tisbut teaching one of these to carry a man, and he may ride up thither, asGanymede did, upon an eagle.” 3. Or, “if neither of these ways willserve, yet I do seriously, and upon gond ground, affirm it possible to makea flying chariot, in which a man may sit, and give such a motion unto it asshall convey him through the air; and this perhaps might be made largeenough to carry diverse men at the same time, together with food fortheir maticum, and Commodities for traflic.” The construction of such achariot, he says, was ‘no difficult matter, if a man had leisure to showmore particularly the means of composing it.’ It is to be regretted thathe did not pretermit some of his labors for that purpose, especially as hisproject was not merely to skim along the surface of this planet, like mo-dern aeronauts, or ancient navigators creeping along shores—but like ano-ther Columbus , to launch out into the unknown regions of space, in searchof other worlds.

Had Wilkinä been a countryman as well as a Contemporary of Galileo,his aerial flights would have been confined to a dungeon, and the wingsof his genius would have been effectually clipped with Roman shears.Indeed we must admit that he was the greater sinner of the two! forGalileo merely taught the absurd doctrine of the sun’s stability, and thatthe earth moved round it, in Opposition to the evidence of his senses, tothe doctrines of the ohurch, and in flat contradiction of those passages inthe Bible, which Bellarmine adduced as proofs indubitable, that the sun‘rises up’ in the east every morning, and ‘goes down’ in the west everynight, and that the earth is established and ‘cannot be moved.’ Whereasthe heretical bishop, endeavored to open a way by which men couldvisit other worlds when they pleased, and that too, without Consulting, orso much as saying ‘by your leave,’ to the successors of St. Peter!

The earliest English aerona.ut was Eimer, a monk of the llth Century.He adapted wings to his hands and feet, and took his flight from a loftytower. He sustained himself in the air for the space of a furlong, but hiscareer, (like that of Dante in the fifteenth Century) terminated unfortu-nately, for by some derangement of his machinery he feil, and both hislegs were broken. Dante, after several successful experiments, feil on theroof of a church and broke his thigh.

It is a singulär fact in the history of the arts, that mechanical skill wasin former times intimately connected with theological pursuits, and thatsome of the cleverest w r orkmen were ecclesiastics, and of the highestgrades too ; witness Gerbert, Dunstan, Albertus, and many others. Thefirst was a Prench mechanician of the lOth Century, whose researchesled him at that early period, to experiment on steam, and on its applicationto produce music. He was successively archbishop of Rheims and Ra-venna, and in 999 took his seat in St. Peter’s chair, and was announcedto the world as Pope Sylvester II . It may now appear stränge thatmonks and friars, abbots, bishops, archbishops and popes, should have beenamong the chief cultivators of, and most expert manipulators in the arts,and that to them we are greatly indebted for their preservation throughthe dark ages; but, in those times, it was so far from being cons'deredderogatory in ecclesiastics to work at ‘ a trade,’ that those who did not, wereaccounted unworthy members of the church; hence monks were cooks,carpenters, bakers, farmers, turners, founders, smiths, painters, carvers,copyists, &c.; all had some occupation, besides the study of their pecuhar