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was that they allowed any mechanical appliances to remain in the kingdom, neither do I believe that they would have done so, had not the professors of Inconsistency and Evasion made a stand against the carrying of the new principles to their legitimate conclusions. These professors however insisted that during the struggle the anti-machinists should use every known improvement in the art of war, and even invented several new weapons, offensive and defensive, while it was in progress. I was surprised at their having so many mechanical specimens as they have in their museums, and that they had rediscovered their past uses so completely; for at the time of the revolution they destroyed and utterly broke in pieces each one of the more complicated machines and burnt all treatises on mechanics and all engineers' workshops, and, so they thought, cut the mischief out root and branch, at an incalculable cost of blood and treasure.

Certainly they had not spared their labour, but work of this description can never be perfectly achieved, and when, some two hundred years before my arrival, all passion upon the subject had cooled down, and no one save a lunatic would have dreamt of reintroducing mechanical appliances, the subject came to be regarded as a curious antiquarian study like that of some long-forgotten religious practices among ourselves. Then came the careful search for whatever fragments could be found, and for any machines that might have been hidden away, and also numberless treatises were written, showing what the functions of each rediscovered machine had been; all being done with no idea of ever using machinery