The great philosopher Descartes formed the theory that all animals are merely automata of a high degree of perfection, and, to prove his notion, he is said to have constructed an automaton in the form of a young girl to which he gave the name of “Ma fille Francine.” This figure came unhappily to a watery grave, for during a voyage by sea the captain of the vessel in which it was travelling had the curiosity to open the case in which Francine was packed and, in his astonishment at the movements of the automaton, which were so wonderfully natural, he threw the whole thing overboard, believing it to be the work of the devil. I now come to what are, if not the most extraordinary _pieces of mechanism_, certainly the most wonderful _automata_ the world has ever seen. In the year 1738 that great mechanical genius M. Vaucanson, a member of the Académie des Sciences exhibited at Paris three very remarkable automata which were, a flute-player, a figure which played the shepherd’s pipe of Provence and the drum, and an artificial duck. The first of these, the flute-player, he described in a Memoir read before the Académie on the 30th of April, 1738. This automaton was a wooden figure six feet six inches in height, representing a well-known antique statue of a Faun, sitting on a rock and mounted on a square pedestal four feet six from the ground. It was capable of performing twelve pieces of music on a German flute, the instrument being really played as a man would play it by blowing across the embouchure and projecting the air with variable force by movable lips, which imitated in their action those of a living player, employing a tongue to regulate the opening, and producing the notes by the tips of the fingers closing or opening the holes. The mechanical devices in this automaton are so beautiful and so scientifically thought out, that I am only sorry that time will not permit me to describe them in detail, but I will try and make its general principles clear. Within the pedestal was a train of wheel-work driven by a weight, which set into motion a small shaft on which were six cranks disposed at equal angular distances around it; to these six cranks as many pairs of bellows were attached (their inlet valves being mechanically opened and closed so as to make them silent in action). The air supplied by these bellows was conveyed to three different wind chests, one loaded with a weight of four pounds, one with a weight of two pounds, and the last having only the weight of its upper board. These wind chests communicated with three little chambers in the body of the figure, and these chambers were all connected with the windpipe which passed up the throat to the cavity of the mouth and terminated in the two movable lips which, between them, formed an orifice that could be protruded or drawn back, and might be further modified by the action of the tongue.