uth and sacked by a titanic force;
therefore he then sought means to preserve his walls, bastions, rampiers,
and sconces from cannon-shot, and to hinder the bullets from hitting him,
stopping them in their flight, or at least from doing him or the besieged
walls any damage. He showed us a trial of this which has been since used
by Fronton, and is now common among the pastimes and harmless recreations
of the Thelemites. I will tell you how he went to work, and pray for the
future be a little more ready to believe what Plutarch affirms to have
tried. Suppose a herd of goats were all scampering as if the devil drove
them, do but put a bit of eringo into the mouth of the hindmost nanny, and
they will all stop stock still in the time you can tell three.

Thus Gaster, having caused a brass falcon to be charged with a sufficient
quantity of gunpowder well purged from its sulphur, and curiously made up
with fine camphor, he then had a suitable ball put into the piece, with
twenty-four little pellets like hail-shot, some round, some pearl fashion;
then taking his aim and levelling it at a page of his, as if he would have
hit him on the breast. About sixty strides off the piece, halfway between
it and the page in a right line, he hanged on a gibbet by a rope a very
large siderite or iron-like stone, otherwise called herculean, formerly
found on Ida in Phrygia by one Magnes, as Nicander writes, and commonly
called loadstone; then he gave fire to the prime on the piece's touch-hole,
which in an instant consuming the powder, the ball and hail-shot were with
incredible violence and swiftness hurried out of the gun at its muzzle,
that the air might penetrate to its chamber, where otherwise would have
been a vacuum, which nature abhors so much, that this universal machine,
heaven, air, land, and sea, would sooner return to the primitive chaos than
admit the least void anywhere. Now the ball and small shot, which
threatened the page with no less than quick destruction, lost their
impetuosity and remained suspended and hovering round the stone; nor did
any of them, notwithstanding the fury with which they rushed, reach the
page.

Master Gaster could do more than all this yet, if you will believe me; for
he invented a way how to cause bullets to fly backwards, and recoil on
those that sent them with as great a force, and in the very numerical
parallel for which the guns were planted. And indeed, why should he have
thought this diffi