268

Claims of Ctesibius, [Book III.

their number. It has frequently been remarked that little dependencecan be placed on ancient writers as regards the authors of the useful ma-chines. Generally those who introduced them from abroad, who im-proved them, increased their effects, or extended their application, werereputed their inventors. This has been the case more or less in everypart of the worid, and is so at the present day. The Greeks found au-thors among themselves for almost every machine, although most of themwere certainly derived from Egypt . Thus, the sails and masts of ships,the wedge, auger, axe and level, were known before Dsedalus. Thesaw, drill, compasses, glue and dovetailing, before Talus. Cast iron wasemployed, and moulding practiced, and the lathe invented, long beforeTheodorus of Samos lived; and the screw and the crane before Archytas .The last individual was celebrated for various inventions, and amongothers, Aristotle mentions the child’s rattle, from which it may be infer-red that he was an amiable man and fond of children—but Egyptian children were amused with various species of toys, centuries before heflourished; and they then had dolls whose limbs were moved by thepulling of strings or wires, as ours have at this day. Wilkinson’s Man-ners and Customs of the Ancient Eygptians. Vol. ii, 426-7.

As regards machines for raising water, we have already seen, thatsome have been ascribed to others than their authors. Even the siphonhas been attributed to Ctesibius, (Adams’s Lectures, vol. iii, 372,) becauseit was found in the construction of his clepsydra, and no earlier applicationof it was then known; but it is now ascertained to have been in common useamong his countrymen in the remote age of Rameses—in the Augustanera of Egypt , when the arts, we are informed, “ attained a degree of per-fection, which no after age succeeded in imitating.” Had the “ Commenta-ries of Ctesibius” to which Vitruvius referred his readers for further infor-mation, been preserved, we should have had no occasion to attempt a defi-nition of his Claims to the forcing pump; unfortunately, however, theseand Archimedes ’ Treatise on Pneumatic and Hydrostatic Engines haveperished, and have left us in comparative ignorance of the history of suchmachines among the ancients.

We have already seen that the syringe was in common use ages beforeCtesibius, and that it was employed by philosophers to illustrate their hy-pothesis of water rushing into a vacuum. Now a forcing pump is merelya syringe with an additional orifice for the liquid’s discharge, and havingboth its receiving and discharging orifices covered by valves or clacks. Cte-sibius therefore did not invent the piston and cylinder, nor was he the firstto discover the application of these to force water, for they were in pre-vious use and for that purpose. Was he the inventor of valves l No, forthey were usedin the Egyptian bellows thirteen or fourteen hundred yearsbefore he lived, and appear always to have been an essential part of thoseinstruments. They were employed in clepsydra; and were most likelyused in the hydraulic organ of Archimedes , which Tertullian has des-cribed. Is the arrangement of the valves, by which water is admittedthrough one and expelled by the other, to be ascribed to himl We believenot, for the same arrangement was previously adopted in the bellows, sofar as regards the application of one of them, and the principle of both:and if it could be shown that the Chinese bellows was then in use, as wesuppose it was, and possibly known in Egypt , (for that some intercoursedid take place in ancient times betwen Egypt and China , even if one peo-ple be not a colony of the other, is proved by Chinese bottles and inscrip-tions found in the tombs at Thebes, ) then the merit of Ctesibius wouldseem to be confmed principally to the construction of metallic bellows as