Matthieu Ricci, 1552-1610, a Jesuit missionary in China, told how in that country a wagon not drawn by horses or other animals was in common use. In an early collection of travels this vehicle was described as follows: "This river is so cloyed with ships because it is not frozen in winter that the way is stopped with multitude; which made Ricius exchange his way by water into another (more strange to us) by waggon, if we may so call it, which had but one wheel, so built that one might sit in the middle as 'twere on horseback, and on each side another, the waggoner putting 't swiftly and safely forwards with levers or barres of wood (those waggons driven by wind and gayle he mentions not.)" It was somewhat later than this that China was indebted to that other famous Jesuit missionary, Verbiest, for his steam carriage, which, however, was not much more than a toy. MANUALLY PROPELLED VEHICLES But in the seventeenth century most attention seems to have been given to devising carriages that should be moved by the hand or foot power of man. The auto car that was run in the streets of Nuremberg, Germany, by Johann Hautsch, in 1649, was of this description, and that of Elié Richard, the physician, of La Rochelle, France, about the same time, was of the same class. Not long after this Potter, of England, came along in 1663 with a mechanical cart designed to travel on legs, and in the same year the celebrated Hooke presented to the Royal Society of England a plan for some sort of a machine by which one could "walk upon the land or water with swiftness, after the manner of a crane." It does not quite appear what that cart and that machine were. One authority thinks that the Hooke patent was for a one-wheel vehicle supposed to be propelled by a person inside the wheel. Then, also, there was Beza, another French physician, with a mechanical vehicle in 1710. OTHER FRENCH AND ENGLISH EXPERIMENTS In fact, the interest in carriages worked by man power extended from the seventeenth well into the nineteenth century. Soon after the time of Beza, mechanical chariots, modeled after the Richard coach, were advertised to be run in London, but it does not appear that they met with public favor. Scientists and others gave much thought to the subject, both in England and in France. John Vevers, master of the boarding-school at Ryegate, Surrey, came out with a carriage that was evidently copied from that of Richard. Other forms of carriages worked by hand or foot power of man were described in the periodicals of the time. George Black, of Berwick-on-the-Tweed, built a wagon to be run by hand power in 1768. In England, John Ladd, of Trowbridge, Wilts, in 1757; John Beaumont, of Ayrshire, in 1788, and in France, Thomas in 1703, Gerard in 1711, Ferry in 1770, and Maillard, Blanchard and Meurice, in 1779, and others, were most active during this period.