al moment.
Thus Dr. Darwin's anticipation of the locomotive, in his Botanic
Garden, published in 1791, before any locomotive had been invented,
might almost be regarded as prophetic:

Soon shall thy arm, unconquered Steam! afar
Drag the slow barge, and drive the rapid car.

Denis Papin first threw out the idea of atmospheric locomotion; and
Gauthey, another Frenchman, in 1782 projected a method of conveying
parcels and merchandise by subterraneous tubes,[6] after the method
recently patented and brought into operation by the London Pneumatic
Despatch Company. The balloon was an ancient Italian invention,
revived by Mongolfier long after the original had been forgotten. Even
the reaping machine is an old invention revived. Thus Barnabe Googe,
the translator of a book from the German entitled 'The whole Arte and
Trade of Husbandrie,' published in 1577, in the reign of Elizabeth,
speaks of the reaping-machine as a worn-out invention--a thing "which
was woont to be used in France. The device was a lowe kinde of carre
with a couple of wheeles, and the frunt armed with sharpe syckles,
whiche, forced by the beaste through the corne, did cut down al before
it. This tricke," says Googe, "might be used in levell and champion
countreys; but with us it wolde make but ill-favoured woorke." [7] The
Thames Tunnel was thought an entirely new manifestation of engineering
genius; but the tunnel under the Euphrates at ancient Babylon, and that
under the wide mouth of the harbour at Marseilles (a much more
difficult work), show that the ancients were beforehand with us in the
art of tunnelling. Macadamized roads are as old as the Roman empire;
and suspension bridges, though comparatively new in Europe, have been
known in China for centuries.

There is every reason to believe--indeed it seems clear that the Romans
knew of gunpowder, though they only used it for purposes of fireworks;
while the secret of the destructive Greek fire has been lost
altogether. When gunpowder came to be used for purposes of war,
invention busied itself upon instruments of destruction. When recently
examining the Museum of the Arsenal at Venice, we were surprised to
find numerous weapons of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
embodying the most recent English improvements in arms, such as
revolving pistols, rifled muskets, and breech-loading cannon. The
latter, embodying Sir William Armstrong's modern idea, though in a rude
form, had be