ranks, who spared no
expense in the contrivance and perfection of elaborate machinery for
the production of complex figures.[8] There was at that time a great
passion for automata in France, which gave rise to many highly
ingenious devices, such as Camus's miniature carriage (made for Louis
XIV. when a child), Degennes' mechanical peacock, Vancanson's duck, and
Maillardet's conjuror. It had the effect of introducing among the
higher order of artists habits of nice and accurate workmanship in
executing delicate pieces of machinery; and the same combination of
mechanical powers which made the steel spider crawl, the duck quack, or
waved the tiny rod of the magician, contributed in future years to
purposes of higher import,--the wheels and pinions, which in these
automata almost eluded the human senses by their minuteness,
reappearing in modern times in the stupendous mechanism of our
self-acting lathes, spinning-mules, and steam-engines.

"In our own country," says Professor Willis, "the literature of this
subject is so defective that it is very difficult to discover what
progress we were making during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries." [9] We believe the fact to be, that the progress made in
England down to the end of last century had been very small indeed, and
that the lathe had experienced little or no improvement until Maudslay
took it in hand. Nothing seems to have been known of the slide rest
until he re-invented it and applied it to the production of machinery
of a far more elaborate character than had ever before been
contemplated as possible. Professor Willis says that Bramah's, in
other words Maudslay's, slide rest of 1794 is so different from that
described in the French 'Encyclopedie in 1772, that the two could not
have had a common origin. We are therefore led to the conclusion that
Maudslay's invention was entirely independent of all that had gone
before, and that he contrived it for the special purpose of overcoming
the difficulties which he himself experienced in turning out duplicate
parts in large numbers. At all events, he was so early and zealous a
promoter of its use, that we think he may, in the eyes of all practical
mechanics, stand as the parent of its introduction to the workshops of
England.

It is unquestionable that at the time when Maudslay began the
improvement of machine-tools, the methods of working in wood and metals
were exceedingly imperfect. Mr. William Fairbairn has