Accordingly, from the beginning he invented the smith’s art, and husbandry to manure the ground, that it might yield him corn; he invented arms and the art of war to defend corn; physic and astronomy, with other parts of mathematics which might be useful to keep corn a great number of years in safety from the injuries of the air, beasts, robbers, and purloiners; he invented water, wind, and handmills, and a thousand other engines to grind corn and to turn it into meal; leaven to make the dough ferment, and the use of salt to give it a savour; for he knew that nothing bred more diseases than heavy, unleavened, unsavoury bread.
He found a way to get fire to bake it; hour-glasses, dials, and clocks to mark the time of its baking; and as some countries wanted corn, he contrived means to convey some out of one country into another.
He had the wit to pimp for asses and mares, animals of different species, that they might copulate for the generation of a third, which we call mules, more strong and fit for hard service than the other two. He invented carts and waggons to draw him along with greater ease; and as seas and rivers hindered his progress, he devised boats, galleys, and ships (to the astonishment of the elements) to waft him over to barbarous, unknown, and far distant nations, thence to bring, or thither to carry 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 these. For one of our great guns when used is more dreadful, more terrible, more diabolical, and maims, tears, breaks, slays, mows down, and sweeps away more men, and causes a greater consternation and destruction than a hundred thunderbolts.
Chapter 4.LXII.—How Gaster invented an art to avoid being hurt or touched by cannon-balls.
Gaster having secured himself with his corn within strongholds, has sometimes been attacked by enemies; his fortresses, by that thrice threefold cursed instrument, levelled and destroyed; his dearly beloved corn and bread snatched out of his mouth 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.