The question concerning the antiquity of automata, properly so called, which are moved by wheels, weights and springs, I shall leave to those who have read the works of the ancient mathematicians, and who may be desirous of writing on the history of mechanics. As far as I know, the ancients were not acquainted with the art of making them, unless some propositions of Ctesibius, mentioned by Vitruvius, allude to that subject. When clocks were brought to perfection, some artists added to them figures, which at the time of striking performed various movements; and as they succeeded in these, some attempted to make, detached from clocks, single figures, which either moved certain limbs, or advanced forward and ran. In the middle of the sixteenth century, when Hans Bullmann[335], a padlock-maker at Nuremberg, constructed figures of men and women which moved backwards and forwards by clock-work, beat a drum, and played on the lute according to musical time, they excited universal astonishment as a new invention. It was about the same period that watches came into use. The accounts however which speak of much older automata deserve to be examined with more attention. The most ancient of all are undoubtedly the tripods constructed by Vulcan[336], which being furnished with wheels, advanced forwards to be used, and again returned to their places. But what was impossible to the gods of Homer? An unbeliever might conjecture that these tripods, which are mentioned also by Aristotle[337], and which perhaps were only a kind of small tables or dumb-waiters, had wheels so contrived that they could be put in motion and driven to a distance on the smallest impulse, like the fire-pans in our country beer-houses, at which the boors light their pipes. That Dædalus made statues which could not only walk, but which it was necessary to tie, in order that they might not move, is related by Plato[338], Aristotle, and others. The latter speaks of a wooden Venus, and remarks that the secret of its motion consisted in quicksilver having been poured into it. What the author here means I cannot comprehend; but I do not imagine that this Venus threw itself topsy-turvy backwards, like the Chinese puppets. However this may be, it is astonishing that the Chinese should have fallen upon the invention of giving motion to puppets by means of quicksilver, and in so ingenious a manner, that Muschenbroek[339] thought it worth his while to describe their whole construction, and to illustrate it by figures. But before this method was known in Europe, Kircher had an idea of putting a small waggon in motion by adding to it a pipe filled with quicksilver, and heating it with a candle placed below it[340]. The account of Aristotle is more mysterious, for he does not inform us how the quicksilver acted.