At this time, while the country was suffering from famine, there was a renewing of the Covenant with fasting and humiliation in St Andrews presbytery. ‘After this exercise,’ says James Melville, one of those chiefly concerned in ordering it, ‘we wanted not a remarkable effect.’ ‘God extraordinarily provided victuals out of all other countries, in sic store and abundance as was never seen in this land before;’ without which ‘thousands had died for hunger,’ ‘for,’ he goes on to say, ‘notwithstanding of the infinite number of bolls of victual that cam hame from other parts, all the harvest quarter of that year, the meal gave aucht, nine, and ten pounds the boll, and the malt eleven and twal, and in the south and west parts many died.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: JUNE 7. 1596.] Napier, still brooding over the dangers from popery, devised at this time certain inventions which he thought would be useful for defending the country in case of invasion. One was a mirror like that of Archimedes, which should collect the beams of the sun, and reflect them concentratedly in one ‘mathematical point,’ for the purpose of burning the enemy’s ships. Another was a similar mirror to reflect artificial fire. A third was a kind of shot for artillery, not to pass lineally through an enemy’s host, destroying only those that stand in its way, but which should ‘range abroad within the whole appointed place, and not departing furth of the place till it had executed his [its] whole strength, by destroying those that be within the bounds of the said place.’ A fourth, the last, was a closed and fortified carriage to bring harquebussiers into the midst of an enemy--a superfluity, one would think, if there was any hopefulness in the third of the series. ‘These inventions, besides devices of sailing under the water, with divers other stratagems for harming of the enemies, by the grace of God and work of expert craftsmen, I hope to perform.’[212] So wrote Napier at the date noted in the margin. Sir Thomas Urquhart describes the third of the devices as calculated to clear a field of four miles’ circumference of all living things above a foot in height: by it, he said, the inventor could destroy 30,000 Turks, without the hazard of a single Christian. He adds that proof of its powers was given on a large plain in Scotland, to _the destruction of a great many cattle and sheep_--a particular that may be doubted. ‘When he was desired by a friend in his last illness to reveal the contrivance, his answer was that, for the ruin and overthrow of man, there were too many devices already framed, which if he could make to be fewer, he would, with his might, endeavour to do; and that therefore, seeing the malice and rancour rooted in the heart of mankind will not suffer them to diminish, the number of them, by any concert of his, should never be increased.’[213] * * * * * [Sidenote: JUNE 24.]