I have asked myself a hundred times how the two intrepid blacksmiths knew the head had spoken, when they were not present to hear it. I never discovered any other solution than this: it was, doubtlessly, _because their bodies were equalized and tempered by chemistry_.
But here is a far more astounding marvel.
Tostat, in his "Commentaires sur l'Enode," states that "Albertus Magnus, Provincial of the Dominicans, at Cologne, constructed a brass man, which he worked at continually for thirty years. This work was performed _under various constellations_ and _according to the laws of perspective_."
When the sun was in the sign of the Zodiac the eyes of this automaton melted metals, on which the characters of the same sign were traced. This intelligent machine was equally gifted with motion and speech, and it revealed to Albertus Magnus some of his most important secrets. Unfortunately, St. Thomas Aquinas, Albertus's pupil, taking this statue for the handiwork of the devil, smashed it with a big stick.
As a finale to these fables, which are well fitted to figure among the marvels performed by Perrault's fairies, I will quote from page 252 of the "Journal des Savants" for 1677: "The artificial man of Reysolius, a statue so resembling the human form, that, with the exception of the operations of the soul, everything that takes place in the body may be witnessed."
What a pity the mechanician stopped so soon! for it would have cost him so little, while making so exquisite a resemblance to the fairest work of the Creator, to add to his automaton a soul moving by clockwork!
This quotation does much honor to the savants who accepted the responsibility of such a statement, and is a further proof how history is written.
It may be easily supposed these works furnished me no guide to the art I so much wished to study; and although I continued my inquiries, I only attained the unsatisfactory result that nothing serious had been written on the subject of automata.
"What!" I said to myself, "can it be possible that the marvellous science which raised Vaucanson's name so high--the science whose ingenious combinations can animate inert matter, and impart to it a species of existence--is the only one without its archives?"