It is not, therefore, surprising that whatever Sir William Congreve said or did concerning any scientific or mechanical subject should have attracted general attention. He devised and made a Perpetual Motion Machine, which, like all others, failed to work. We submit that his plan is peculiarly ingenious, and we fail to see how, without a knowledge of the principles of Conservation of Energy, the Congreve idea should not have appealed to any one as reasonable, and its failure puzzling. An account of the Congreve device and an explanation of his ideas appeared in "The Atlas" in 1827, and the following description is taken from the article appearing in "The Atlas": The celebrated Boyle entertained an idea that perpetual motion might be obtained by means of capillary attraction; and, indeed, there seems but little doubt that nature has employed this force in many instances to produce this effect. There are many situations in which there is every reason to believe that the sources of springs on the tops and sides of mountains depend on the accumulation of water created at certain elevations by the operation of capillary attraction, acting in large masses of porous material, or through laminated substances. These masses being saturated, in process of time become the sources of springs and the heads of rivers; and thus, by an endless round of ascending and descending waters, form, on the great scale of nature, an incessant cause of perpetual motion, in the purest acceptance of the term, and precisely on the principle that was contemplated by Boyle. It is probable, however, that any imitation of this process on the limited scale practicable by human art would not be of sufficient magnitude to be effective. Nature, by the immensity of her operations, is able to allow for a slowness of process which would baffle the attempts of man in any direct and simple imitation of her works. Working, therefore, upon the same causes, he finds himself obliged to take a more complicated mode to produce the same effect. To amuse the hours of a long confinement from illness, Sir William Congreve has recently contrived a scheme of perpetual motion, founded on this principle of capillary attraction, which, it is apprehended, will not be subject to the general refutation applicable to those plans in which the power is supposed to be derived from gravity only. Sir William's perpetual motion is as follows: [Illustration]