These
Professors, moreover, insisted that during the struggle the
anti-machinists should use every known improvement in the art of war, and
several new weapons, offensive and defensive, were invented, while it was
in progress. I was surprised at there remaining so many mechanical
specimens as are seen in the museums, and at students having rediscovered
their past uses so completely; for at the time of the revolution the
victors wrecked all the more complicated machines, and burned all
treatises on mechanics, and all engineers' workshops--thus, so they
thought, cutting 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 dreamed of reintroducing forbidden inventions, 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 using such machinery again, but with
the feelings of an English antiquarian concerning Druidical monuments or
flint arrow heads.
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