392

Ancient Tricks performeä by Steam.

[Book IV.

The domestic exhibitions of the force of steam must have excited theattention of mechanicians in every age, nor could its capabi-lities of over-coming resistances opposed to it, have escaped them. Thus we find thatexperimenters are almost always said to have derived the first hint froma culinary vessel : hence the Marquis of Worcester, according to a tradi-tion, had his attention drawn to the use of this fluid to raise water, bywitnessing, while a prisoner in the Tower of London , the.lid of a boilerthrown off by the vapor—but the anecdote is of much older date, andwas applied to many others before his time as well as since. Vitruvius illustrates his views respecting the appearance of springs on mountains,by a cauldron which, he says, when two thirds filled with water and heat-ed by the fire, “ communicates the heat to the water; and this on accountof its natural porosity, receiving a strong inflation from the heat, not onlyfills the vessel, but swelling with the steam and raising the cover, Over-flows,” &c. (Book viii, chap. 3.) Such occurrences are nature’s hints,by attention to which important discoveries have always been made.Even when people in former Limes were injured by the explosion of acauldron, the misfortune should have been considered as an indicatim ofnature to employ the force thus developed—and also as a punishmentfor having neglected to do so. Nay, we don’t see why such occurrencesmay not, in this view of them, be considered providential, as well as simi-lar ones, which theological writers avail themselves of, to establish asimilar doctrine.

There are intimations that the elastic force of steam was employed byseveral people of antiquity, but the details of its application are unfortu-nately not known. Some relics of its use, as well as that of heated air,are to be found in the deceptions praeticed by the heathen priesthood. Itsapplication for similar purposes was continued tili comparatively moderntimes, for it was the animating principle in the eolipilic idols of the middleages ; and, from an incidental notice of some experiments of a Greek archi-tect, it is probable that the trembling of the earth, andother horrors expe-rienced by those who were initiated into the greater mysteries of ancientworship, were also effected by steam. Artificial thunder, lightning fromthe vapor of inflammable liquids, and unearthly music, were produced byits means. Some of the tricks performed by the Pythoness and her co-adjutors at Delphos seemed to have been matured by it. The famoustripod against which she leaned is represented as a brazen vessel fromwhich a miraculous vapor arose. Steam was one of the agents of decep-tion in trials of ordeal. Those persons condemned to undergo that ofboiling water, were protected by the priests (when it was their interestor inclination to do so) by admitting a concealed stream of steam into thelower part of the cauldron containing tepid water—the consequent agita-tion of the liquid and the ascent of the vapor that escaped condensationpresented to the ignorant and unsuspecting beholders every appearanceof genuine ebullition. On similar occasions air was forced through theliquid in the dark ages.

Ancient priests, both among the Jews and heathen, were from theirordinary duties necessarily conversant with the generation of steam. Itselastic force could not therefore escape the shrewd observers among them.Sacrifices were frequently boiled in huge cauldrons, several of which werepermanently fixed in the vicinity of temples—in “ the boiling places” astheir locations are named by Ezekiel, “ where the ministers of the houseshall boil the sacrifice of the people. ' (See an example from Herodotus at page 200.) It would seem moreover as if some of the boilers weremade on the principle of Papin’s Digester, in which bones were softened