On Automata, or Self-Moving Machines

around the guests, and finally, as if weary, it returned to his hand. These are marvelous things, and almost exceed the limits of belief; nonetheless, our hearing these things confirmed by the testimony of so many men, and seeing every day things that surpass the belief of those who do not see them, can assure us that these are not fables. Such, then, is the invention of these , and such is the progress they have been making until our own times. The genre of these machines of delight and wonder may be divided into two according to their motors: namely, into and . I say according to their motors; for the Pneumatic derive their motion from enclosed spirit, and the Self-moving from the weight of counterpoises; and in our times also from springs, which possess the same virtue as counterpoises. The Pneumatic ones, even if they have not been manifestly divided, could nevertheless be divided into several species, seeing that some of them operate by reason of a vacuum, and of air expressed or retained, and others by means of air, or of moisture resolved and rarefied. The first are those in which fire is not employed, such as those vessels called ; the spheres that cast water on high, the cups of concord, the voices of blackcaps, and other such things; the second are those wherein it is employed, such as the sacrifices, the leaping pellets, the little figures that dance within an enclosure of glass or horn, the miliaria, and other such things; among the number of which could be placed those organs which of Fleury—who, after having been Archbishop of Reims, then of Ravenna, and finally Pope—made to sound with the aid of heated water. The Self-moving machines are then divided into two distinct and named species, according to which division partitioned his treatise on them into these two Books, which we are translating. The first species is called Mobile,