ry corn.

Besides, seeing that when he had tilled the ground, some years the corn
perished in it for want of rain in due season, in others rotted or was
drowned by its excess, sometimes spoiled by hail, eat by worms in the ear,
or beaten down by storms, and so his stock was destroyed on the ground; we
were told that ever since the days of yore he has found out a way to
conjure the rain down from heaven only with cutting certain grass, common
enough in the field, yet known to very few, some of which was then shown
us. I took it to be the same as the plant, one of whose boughs being
dipped by Jove's priest in the Agrian fountain on the Lycian mountain in
Arcadia, in time of drought raised vapours which gathered into clouds, and
then dissolved into rain that kindly moistened the whole country.

Our master of arts was also said to have found a way to keep the rain up in
the air, and make it to fall into the sea; also to annihilate the hail,
suppress the winds, and remove storms as the Methanensians of Troezene used
to do. And as in the fields thieves and plunderers sometimes stole and
took by force the corn and bread which others had toiled to get, he
invented the art of building towns, forts, and castles, to hoard and secure
that staff of life. On the other hand, finding none in the fields, and
hearing that it was hoarded up and secured in towns, forts, and castles,
and watched with more care than ever were the golden pippins of the
Hesperides, he turned engineer, and found ways to beat, storm, and demolish
forts and castles with machines and warlike thunderbolts, battering-rams,
ballists, and catapults, whose shapes were shown to us, not over-well
understood by our engineers, architects, and other disciples of Vitruvius;
as Master Philibert de l'Orme, King Megistus's principal architect, has
owned to us.

And seeing that sometimes all these tools of destruction were baffled by
the cunning subtlety or the subtle cunning (which you please) of
fortifiers, he lately invented cannons, field-pieces, culverins, bombards,
basiliskos, murdering instruments that dart iron, leaden, and brazen balls,
some of them outweighing huge anvils. This by the means of a most dreadful
powder, whose hellish compound and effect has even amazed nature, and made
her own herself outdone by art, the Oxydracian thunders, hails, and storms
by which the people of that name immediately destroyed their enemies in the
field being but mere potguns to t