There can, however, be no doubt that, vague and mysterious though the ‘Scantlings’ be, they indicate a knowledge of mechanical principles considerably in advance of the age, as well as a high degree of mechanical ingenuity. The hundred Articles into which the book is divided contain suggestions, in shorthand descriptions, of things so various as ship-destroying machines, telegraphs, combination and escutcheon locks,[11] improvements in fire-arms, universal alphabets, seals and watches, various kinds of cipher, a boat rowing against wind and tide, automata, and mechanical appliances of different kinds, including the “stupendious and semi-omnipotent” engine. Some of them read like descriptions of conjuring tricks, such as the artificial bird, the hour water-ball, the flying man, the brazen head, the dicing-box, and various automata. Others are full of prophetic insight, and contain anticipations of mechanical marvels, which, however wonderful they may at that time have appeared, have since been fully realised. The style in which the treatise was written, however, presented so remarkable a contrast to the contemporary writings of Newton, Boyle, Pascal, Guericke, and others, that it is not improbable it had the effect of prejudicing the minds of scientific men against the writer, and led them to regard his schemes as those of a wild projector, and hence to treat his propositions with neglect, if not with contumely. [11] The writer of the elaborate article “Lock,” in the supplement to the ‘Penny Cyclopædia’ (ii. 217), in describing the _combination lock_, says: “The Marquis of Worcester, in whose ‘Century of Inventions’ several different kinds of lock, which lay claim to the most marvellous properties, are enumerated, would appear, from his 72nd article, to have devised an improvement on this apparatus; as he refers to ‘an escutcheon to be placed before any of these locks,’ one of the properties of which he describes as being that ‘the owner, though a woman, may, with her delicate hand, vary the ways of coming to open the lock ten millions of times beyond the knowledge of the smith that made it, or of me who invented it.’ The details of this invention are not given; but in the third volume of the ‘Transactions of the Society of Arts,’ pp. 160–5, is an escutcheon of similar character, invented by Mr. Marshall, and rewarded by the Society in 1784. The details of this ingenious contrivance are fully given in the volume referred to.”