[72] This project, however, is mentioned of an engine called by him “a semi-omnipotent engine,” the subject of the 98th invention: “an engine so contrived, that working the _Primum mobile_ forward or backward, upward or downward, circularly or cornerwise, to and fro, straight, upright or downright, yet the pretended operation continueth and advanceth, none of the motions above-mentioned hindering, much less stopping the other.” This engine is obviously not the same as that described as the sixty-eighth invention. [73] A well-known story, quoted at length in the Memoirs of Sir John Barrow, connected de Caus with the Marquis of Worcester in dramatic fashion. The Marquis was being conducted through the prison of the Bicêtre in Paris when his attention was attracted by the screams of an old madman who had made a wonderful discovery of the power of steam, and who had so importuned Cardinal Richelieu that he had been incarcerated as a nuisance. “This person,” said the insolvent Lord Worcester after conversing with him, “is no madman; and in my country, instead of shutting him up, they would heap riches upon him. In this prison you have buried the greatest genius of your age.” The fable, and its exposure by a French writer, M. Figuier, are described in Dirck’s book. [74] Millington: _Natural Philosophy_. [75] Sir E. D. Lawrence: _Steam in Relation to Cornwall_. [76] Enouf: _Papin, sa vie et son œuvre_. [77] On the evidence of a picture purporting to represent the first Newcomen engine, in which mechanisms are shown for operating the cocks automatically, an attempt has been made to prove that the manipulated cocks were a figment and the story of Humphrey Potter a myth. The iconoclast has not been successful. The evidence that the first engines were hand-controlled is very general (see Galloway’s _Steam Engine and Its Inventors_). [78] At this time the corpuscular theory of heat still held the field. “Caloric,” or the matter of heat, was supposed to be a substance which could be imparted to or abstracted from a body, which had the property of augmenting its bulk, but not its weight, by setting its particles at a greater or less distance from one another. [79] _Encycl. Brit._, Eleventh Edition. [80] A text-book published a few years before Robins’ birth (Binnings’ _Light to the Art of Gunnery_, 1689) told how a certain profane and godless gunner, Cornelius Slime, was carried off by the devil before the eyes of the astonished onlookers! [81] Whewell: _Hist. of the Inductive Sciences_. [82] Dr. Halley: _Phil. Trans._, 1686.