May it please your Oddship, Brethren and Guests of Y^e Sette of Odd Volumes. The origin of this little paper is very simple. Just eleven months ago we had the delight of listening to the very interesting and instructive communication upon the work of that wonderful mechanical genius, electrician, and _prestidigitateur_, Robert-Houdin, presented to us by my very good friend, our revered Seer, Brother Manning. With the object of contributing something to the discussion which followed that paper, I began to make a few notes upon Automata, with which subject the name of Robert-Houdin must for ever be associated; I soon found, however, that the subject was so comprehensive and went back into such remote periods of antiquity, that to do it even the most scanty justice would require a paper devoted to itself alone; and, as our esteemed Pilgrim and Past-President, Brother Holme, was at that time pressing me for a paper with that persistency and importunity which characterized his presidentship and gave it so much of its success, I, as a loyal Odd Volume, felt bound to obey the mandate of his Oddship; and, holding the honourable office of _Mechanick_ to the Sette, I have chosen “Automata Old and New” for the subject of this communication. The word Automaton would in its strictest and most comprehensive sense include all apparently self-moving machines or devices which contain within themselves their own motive power, and in this sense such machines as clocks and watches, and even locomotives and steamships might be included. I shall, however, throughout this paper limit myself to the more restricted and more ordinarily accepted meaning of the term, namely, such self-moving machines as are made either in the forms of men or of animals, or by which animal motions and functions are more or less imitated. As mechanics, next to mathematics and astronomy, is the most ancient of sciences, and as the scientific knowledge of the ancients was ever shrouded in mystery to conceal it from the eyes of the vulgar, and to confer upon the initiated power and profit by working on the credulity of the ignorant, it was but only to be expected that mechanical science should be early applied in the ancient mysteries by which the philosophers and the priests of antiquity maintained so much of their supremacy. One of the very earliest allusions to mysterious self-moving machines is to be found in the eighteenth book of the “Iliad,” wherein we are told of Vulcan that “Full twenty tripods for his hall he fram’d, That, placed on living wheels of massy gold (Wondrous to tell) instinct with spirit roll’d From place to place, around the bless’d abodes, Self-mov’d, obedient to the beck of gods.”[1]