This record is given by Caspar Schott, a Jesuit, and tells of an engine constructed by Hautsch of Nuremberg, a city long famous for mechanical contrivances. The machine was really a large water-cistern drawn on a wheeled car, or sledge; and the secret of its propulsive power, Schott supposes was a horizontal cylinder containing a piston and producing an action like a pump. The cistern measured 8 feet long by 4 feet high, and 2 feet wide; its small width being probably designed for entering narrow streets. It was operated by twenty-eight men, and it forced a stream of water an inch thick to a height of about eighty feet. Hautsch desired to keep the methods of its construction secret; but, apparently, it was not furnished with the important air-chamber, and does not seem to have differed very materially from Hero's siphon. Schott also says he had seen one forty years before at Königshofen. Notwithstanding, therefore, the danger of great conflagrations, mankind does not seem to have made much progress in the construction of fire-engines from the days of Ctesibius until the time of Charles II., a period of about eighteen hundred years. On the other hand, we must remember that syringes and water-buckets can be of very great service when promptly and efficiently used. Even to-day London firemen find similar appliances of great value for small conflagrations in rooms. But we get a vivid little picture of the helplessness of even the seventeenth-century public before a fire of any size, in a description left by Wallington of a fire on Old London Bridge in 1633. Houses were then built on the bridge, and Wallington says: "All the conduits near were opened, and the pipes that carried the water through the streets were cut open, and the water swept down with brooms with help enough; but it was the will of God it should not prevail. For the three engines which are such excellent things that nothing that ever was devised could do so much good, yet none of them did prosper, for they were all broken, and the tide was very low that they could get no water, and the pipes that were cut yielded but littel. Some ladders were broke to the hurt of many; for several had their legges broke, some their arms; and some their ribes, and many lost their lives." More than fifty houses, we may add, were destroyed by this fire. Of what character were the engines to which he refers we cannot tell. We do not know whether any engine like Hautsch's was established in London at this time, or at the date of the Great Fire; but if so, it was not apparently much in vogue. It must be remembered that the term "engine" was applied indiscriminately to any sort of mechanical contrivance, and even to a skilful plan or method (Shakespeare uses the word to designate an instrument of torture); if, therefore, the word is used for a fire-extinguishing appliance by any old writer, it does not follow that the so-called engine would resemble Hautsch's machine or a modern fire-engine.