The date 1603, however, can hardly be correct; it ought rather to be 1693, and in that case the tract might have been three times printed between that period and 1690. The date in the title-page of my copy appears properly to have in it a 9, which resembles a zero, only because the compositor used a type on which the lower part of the figure was broke. That this conjecture is true, I have, I think, sufficiently proved; though Munchhausen, Haller, and others read the date 1603. In the year 1669, John Evelyn gave to the Royal Society of London a complete description of Locatelli’s invention[553]. He there says that the inventor went with his machine to Spain, where he proved the advantage of it by public experiments, and described them in a Spanish work, dedicated to Geronimo de Camargo, member of the _Consejo real de Castilla_, who was commissioned by the king to make known and promote the use of this machine, the sale of which was secured to the inventor at a price fixed in his patent. This Spanish work, from which Evelyn made an extract, was printed with the Austrian approbation of Crollolanza, and the date Aug. 1st, 1663. Locatelli must immediately after have gone to Spain, for it is there stated that his machines were made and sold in great abundance at Madrid, in 1664. The invention belongs, therefore, to the year 1663. This machine was exceedingly simple. The seed-box, the cylinder of which was furnished with two small wheels, required only to be hooked or fastened, by means of ropes, to the stilt of the plough. A figure of it may be found in the before-mentioned German tract; also in the Philosophical Transactions, and thence copied into Duhamel’s Traité de la Culture des Terres[554].