The eccentric and learned physician and mathematician, Jerome Cardan, was the first modern writer who paid serious and scientific attention to the mechanism of marionettes. He refers to them in two different works, and in one of these, a sort of encyclopedia, entitled _de Varietate Rerum_, when speaking of the humbler branches of mechanics, he expresses his surprise at the marvels performed by two Sicilians, by means of two wooden figures which they worked between them. “There was no sort of dance,” he says, “that these figures were not able to imitate, making the most surprising gestures with feet and legs, arms and head, the whole with such variety of attitude, that I cannot, I confess, understand the nature of the ingenious mechanism, for there were not several strings, sometimes slack and sometimes tight, but only one to each figure, and that was always at full stretch. I have seen many other figures set in motion by several strings, alternately tight and slack, which is nothing marvellous. I must further say that it was a truly agreeable spectacle to behold how the steps and gestures of these dolls kept time with the music.” Such variety and precision of movement prevent the possibility of confounding this exhibition with that puppet-show of the lowest class common in the streets at the present day, where a Savoyard boy makes a doll dance upon a board by means of a string fastened to his knee.[2] M. Magnin supposes that the single string, always at full stretch, was a little tube, through which passed a number of small strings connected with the interior of the puppet. A similar plan is general in Italy at the present day amongst the aristocracy of the marionettes—those whose performances are in regular theatres, and not in wandering show-boxes. The theatre and the mode of working of out-of-door puppet-shows is the same in most countries, and it appears more than probable, from the authorities adduced by M. Magnin, that the marionettes of Greece and ancient Italy had much the same sort of stage as that on which the _pupazzi_ of Italian towns, the London Punch, and the Guignol and Gringalet of Paris, are to the present day exhibited; namely, a sort of large sentry-box or little fortress, called _castello_ in Italy, _castillo_ in Spain, and _castellet_ in France. In Persia, in Constantinople, in Cairo, the same form prevails. In modern times the extent of the stage has been diminished, and the apparatus lightened, so as to admit of theatre, scenery, actors, and orchestra being carried long distances by two men. Formerly, in Spain, as we gather from Cervantes and other authorities, a cart was necessary to convey the theatrical baggage of a _titerero_, which was on a larger scale than at the present day, many more figures appearing on the stage, and the mode of working them being different from that now in use in strolling puppet-shows, where the usual and very simple process is for