Several others of the ancient poets besides Homer have sung about the wonderful mechanical devices of Vulcan, among which were golden statues, the semblances of living maids, which not only appeared to be endued with life, but which walked by his side and bore him up as he walked. Aristotle also refers to self-moving tripods, and Philostratus states that Appolonius of Tyana saw similar pieces of mechanism among the Brahmins of India; but this must have been nearly four hundred years after Aristotle wrote, and some nine hundred years after the time of Homer. Then again we hear of Dædalus making self-moving statues, small figures of the gods, of which Plato in his “Menos” says that unless they were fastened they would of themselves run away, and he puts this into the mouth of Socrates, who uses it as a figure to illustrate the importance of not only acquiring but of holding fast scientific truth that it may not fly away from us. Aristotle in referring to these statues affirms that Dædalus accomplished his object by putting into them quicksilver, but the learned mechanician Bishop Wilkins points out that “this would have been too grosse a way for so excellent an artificer; it is more likely that he did it with wheels and weights.”[2] We are moreover told by Macrobius[3] that in the temple of Hieropolis at Antium there were moving statues. A contemporary of Plato and, it is said, his master, was Archytas of Tarentum, the celebrated Pythagorean philosopher, mathematician, cosmographer, and mechanician, to whom is accredited the invention of the screw and of the crane. Archytas is said to have constructed of wood a pigeon that could fly about, but which could not rise again after it had settled; and Aulus Gellius (who lived in the reigns of Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius), tells us in his “Noctes Atticæ,” that “many men of eminence among the Greeks, and Favonius, the philosopher, a most vigilant searcher into antiquity, have in a most positive manner assured us that the model of a pigeon, formed in wood by Archytas, was so contrived as by a certain mechanical art and power to fly; so nicely was it balanced by weights and put in motion by hidden and inclosed air. In a matter so very improbable we may be allowed to add the words of Favonius himself: ‘Archytas of Tarentum, being both a philosopher and skilled in mechanics, made a wooden pigeon which had it ever settled would not have risen again till now.’”[4] And I am bound to admit that in this point I agree with him.