There was not yet an end to the curious circumstances connected with Dundee’s widow. The year after the discovery of the |1694.| embalmed corpses in Kilsyth Church, a tenant of Colzium garden, digging potatoes, found a small glittering object in a clod of earth. He soon discovered it to be a ring, but at first concluded it was a bauble of little value. Remembering, however, the story of Lady Dundee’s ring, lost upwards of a century before, he began to think it might be that once dear pledge of affection, and soon ascertained that in all probability it was so, as within its plain hoop was inscribed a posy exactly such as the circumstances would have called for—Zovrs onlly & Euer. The lover and his family and name were all gone—his chosen lay silent in the funeral vault: but here was the voice of affection still crying from the ground, and claiming from another generation of men the sympathy which we all feel in each other’s pure emotions.
June 14.
James Young, writer in Edinburgh, stated to the Privy Council that he had been at great pains and expense in bringing to perfection ‘ane engine for writing, whereby five copies may be done at the same time, which it is thought may prove not unuseful to the nation.’ He requested and obtained a nineteen years’ privilege of exclusively making this ‘engine’ for the public.
Young seems to have been a busy-brained man of the inventive and mechanical type, and as such, of course, must have been a prodigy to the surrounding society of his day. In January 1695, we find him again coming before the Privy Council, but this time in company with Patrick Sibbald, locksmith, the one as inventor, the other as maker, of a new lock of surprising accomplishments. It ‘gives ane account of how oft it is opened, and consequently may be very useful in many cases’—for example, ‘though the key were lost, and found by another person, it discovers if that person has opened the lock; if your servant should steal the key, and take things out of the room or cabinet, it discovers how oft they have done it; if you find one of your servants is dishonest, but know not whom to challenge, this lock may set you on the right man; if you have any rooms with fine furniture, pictures, glasses, or curiosities, if you desire your servants not to let any of their acquaintances in to see the room, lest they abuse or break anything in it, though you leave them the key, as in some instances it is necessary, yet this lock discovers if they break your orders, and how oft; if you be sick, and must intrust your keys to a servant, this lock discovers if he takes occasion when you are asleep, to look into your cabinet, and how oft.’ It was conceived |1694.| that this clever lock ‘would be for the public good,’ if it were only ‘to frighten servants into honesty.’ Wherefore the inventor and maker had no hesitation in asking for an exclusive privilege of making it for fifteen years, at the same time agreeing that the price of the simplest kind should be not more than fifteen shillings sterling. The petition was complied with.[[125]]
There was at this time at Grange Park, near Edinburgh, a house called the House of Curiosities, the owner of which made an exhibition of it, and professed to have new articles on view every month of the passing summer. A colloquy between Quentin and Andrew[[126]] gives an account of it, from which it appears that one of the most prominent articles was the ingenious lock above described. Another was the aforementioned writing-engine, but now described as calculated to produce fifteen or sixteen copies by one effort with the pen, and so proving ‘an excellent medium between printing and the common way of writing.’ A third was thus described by Andrew: ‘They took me up to a darkened room, where, having a hole bored through the window, about an inch in diameter, upon which they had fixed a convex lens, the objects that were really without were represented within, with their proper shapes, colours, and motions, reversed, upon a white board, so that, it being a very clear sunshiny day, I saw men, women, and children walking upon the road with their feet upwards; and they told me, the clearer the day, it does the better.’ It may be inferred with tolerable confidence that this House of Curiosities was a speculation of James Young, the inventor of the lock and writing-engine.
It is curious to trace the feeling of strangeness expressed in this brochure towards scientific toys with which we are now familiar. Much is made of a Magical Lantern, whereby pictures of Scaramouch, Actæon, and Diana, and twenty others, ‘little broader than a ducatoon,’ are ‘magnified as big as a man.’ Eolus’s Fiddle, which, being hung in a window, ‘gives a pleasant sound like an organ, and a variety of notes all the day over,’ is descanted upon with equal gusto. ‘Sometimes it gives little or no satisfaction,’ Andrew admits; ‘but when I was there, it happened to do very well.’ There is also a very animated account of a machine for telling how far you have travelled—the modern and well-known pedometer.
1694.
One of the articles for the month of June was of such a kind that, if reproduced, it would even now be original and surprising. It is a Horizontal Elastic Pacing Saddle—horizontal, because it had four pins to keep it level; elastic, because of four steel springs; and pacing, because designed to make one have the sensation and experiences of pacing while in reality trotting. ‘I saw it tried by three or four gentlemen, who all gave good approbation of it.’
Another of the June articles serves to shew that the principle of the revolver is no new invention. It is here called David Dun’s Machine, being a gun composed of ten barrels, with forty breeches adapted to the ends of the barrels, ‘somewhat like that of a rifled gun.’ ‘The breeches are previously charged, and in half a minute you may wheel them all about by tens, and fire them through the ten barrels.’
Amongst the other articles now well known are—a Swimmingbelt—a Diving Ark, identical with the Diving Bell since re-invented—a Humbling Mirror, the object of which is to reflect a human being in a squat form—and the Automatical Virginals, which seem neither more nor less than a barrel-organ with clock-work. ‘It plays only foreign springs, but I am told it might be made to play Scots tunes.’ There was also the now little-heard-of toy called Kircher’s Disfigured Pictures. A sheet of strangely confused colouring being laid down on a table, a cylinder of polished metal is set down in the midst of it, and in this you then see reflected from the sheet a correct picture of some beautiful object. ‘There happened to be an English gentleman there, who told it was one of the greatest curiosities now in Oxford College.’ It was a toy, be it remarked, in some vogue at this time among the Jacobites, as it enabled them to keep portraits of the exiled royal family, without apprehension of their being detected by the Lord Advocate.