The fable, and its exposure by a French writer, M. Figuier, are described in Dirck’s book.
[74] Millington: Natural Philosophy.
[75] Sir E. D. Lawrence: Steam in Relation to Cornwall.
[76] Enouf: Papin, sa vie et son œuvre.
[77] On the evidence of a picture purporting to represent the first Newcomen engine, in which mechanisms are shown for operating the cocks automatically, an attempt has been made to prove that the manipulated cocks were a figment and the story of Humphrey Potter a myth. The iconoclast has not been successful. The evidence that the first engines were hand-controlled is very general (see Galloway’s Steam Engine and Its Inventors).
[78] At this time the corpuscular theory of heat still held the field. “Caloric,” or the matter of heat, was supposed to be a substance which could be imparted to or abstracted from a body, which had the property of augmenting its bulk, but not its weight, by setting its particles at a greater or less distance from one another.
[79] Encycl. Brit., Eleventh Edition.
[80] A text-book published a few years before Robins’ birth (Binnings’ Light to the Art of Gunnery, 1689) told how a certain profane and godless gunner, Cornelius Slime, was carried off by the devil before the eyes of the astonished onlookers!
[81] Whewell: Hist. of the Inductive Sciences.
[82] Dr. Halley: Phil. Trans., 1686.