en fished up from the bottom of the Adriatic, where the
ship armed with them had been sunk hundreds of years ago. Even
Perkins's steam-gun was an old invention revived by Leonardo da Vinci
and by him attributed to Archimedes.[8] The Congreve rocket is said to
have an Eastern origin, Sir William Congreve having observed its
destructive effects when employed by the forces under Tippoo Saib in
the Mahratta war, on which he adopted and improved the missile, and
brought out the invention as his own.

Coal-gas was regularly used by the Chinese for lighting purposes long
before it was known amongst us. Hydropathy was generally practised by
the Romans, who established baths wherever they went. Even chloroform
is no new thing. The use of ether as an anaesthetic was known to
Albertus Magnus, who flourished in the thirteenth century; and in his
works he gives a recipe for its preparation. In 1681 Denis Papin
published his Traite des Operations sans Douleur, showing that he had
discovered methods of deadening pain. But the use of anaesthetics is
much older than Albertus Magnus or Papin; for the ancients had their
nepenthe and mandragora; the Chinese their mayo, and the Egyptians
their hachisch (both preparations of Cannabis Indica), the effects of
which in a great measure resemble those of chloroform. What is perhaps
still more surprising is the circumstance that one of the most elegant
of recent inventions, that of sun-painting by the daguerreotype, was in
the fifteenth century known to Leonardo da Vinci,[9] whose skill as an
architect and engraver, and whose accomplishments as a chemist and
natural philosopher, have been almost entirely overshadowed by his
genius as a painter.[10] The idea, thus early born, lay in oblivion
until 1760, when the daguerreotype was again clearly indicated in a
book published in Paris, written by a certain Tiphanie de la Roche,
under the anagrammatic title of Giphantie. Still later, at the
beginning of the present century, we find Thomas Wedgwood, Sir Humphry
Davy, and James Watt, making experiments on the action of light upon
nitrate of silver; and only within the last few months a silvered
copper-plate has been found amongst the old household lumber of Matthew
Boulton (Watt's partner), having on it a representation of the old
premises at Soho, apparently taken by some such process.[11]

In like manner the invention of the electric telegraph, supposed to be
exclusively modern, was clearly