312 Fire-Engines forgotten in the Middle Ages. [Book III.
probability is that many lives would be lost, notwithstanding tbe greatnumber of our public engines, and hose and ladder Companies. Juvenal intimates the djstressed Situation of those dwelling above under suchcircumstances.
Hark ! where Ucalegon for water cries
Casts out bis chattels, f'roin the peril flies,
Dense smoke is bursting from th efloor below. Sat. iii.
However perfect or imperfect, hydraulic and hydro-pneumatic enginesin ancient Alexandria and Rome may have been, it is certain that thesemachines and the arts related to them experienced the withering influ-ence of that moral and mental desolation which raged throughout Europe during the dark ages. The decline of learning was necessarily accom-panied with a corresponding decay in all the useful and ornamental arts:some of these have disappeared altogether, and have never been recover-ed, so that the attainments of the ancients m them have perished. But theConnection between literature and the arts was as apparent. in their resto-ration as in their declension—if they departed together they also returnedin Company. The revival of learning not only led to the introduction ofprinting and the invention of the press, but it f’urnished, in the multiplica-tion of ancient manuscripts, then extant, immediate employment for both;and although it may be supposed that there can be little or no relation be-tween Glreek or Latin manuscripts and modern fire-engines, yet therereally is an intimate one, for it is all but certain that the first idea of thesemachines as now made, was derived from Heron’s Spiritalia; just as theapplication of double and treble forcing pumps in modern water-works,was from Vitruvius ’ treatise on architecture. The printing press, there-fore, not only opened the literary treasures of the ancients to the worldat large, which had previously been confined to a few, but at the sametime it made us acquainted with some of their machinery and their arts,that had long been forgotten or lost sight of.
Fire-engines were nearly or altogether forgotten in the middle ages:portable syringes seem to have been the only contrivances, except buckets,for throwing water on fires, and from their inefficiency and other causes,their employment was very limited. The general ignorance which thenpervaded Europe not only prevented the establishment of manufactoriesof better instruments; but the superstitions of the times ac tually discouragedtheir use. There is not a more singulär fact (and it is an incontrovertibleone) in the history of the human mind, than that the religious doctrinesand opinions of a large portion of mankind should have in every ageproduced the most deplorable results with regard to conflagrations. TheParsees, Ghebres, &c. of Asia , and other religious sects, which have sub-sisted from the remotest ages, never willingly throw water upon fires—they consider it criminal to quench it, no matter how disastrous the resultmay be: they had rather perish in it tban thus extinguish the emblem of theDeity they worship. “ They would sooner be persuaded to pour on oylto increase, than water to assuage the Harne.”® Among such people fire-engines of course were never used. Another and a larger part of thehuman race though they entertain no such reverence for fire, are sofar influenced by the pernicious doctrine of Fatalism , as to make little orno efforts to suppress it. They look upon fires as the act of God ! deter-mined by him ! and therefore conclude it useless to contend with him, inattempting to extinguish those which He has kindled ! Hence the pro-verbial indifference of Mahommedans in the midst of conflagrations. What