The Various and Ingenious Machines

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...eyes to the dark owls. But if anything is confirmed with reason by the Mathematicians in Geometria Geometry or in Arithmetica Arithmetic, we esteem it as infallible and certain as if it were spoken by the Oracolo d'Apolline Oracle of Apollo. Whence it is seen that just as the Discipline mathematiche Mathematical disciplines are of the greatest moment, both in administering public and private affairs, and in rendering our intellect perfect, so one cannot imagine anything more honest, more useful, or more necessary to the human race than what the Mathematical disciplines are. For the other sciences, after the creation of the world, discovered their uses with the long progression of time; but this arte Mecanica Mechanical art was so necessary to men in the very principles of the world that, if it had been removed, it would have seemed as if the light of the Sun had remained extinguished in the world. And, to begin from the first father of the human generation, Adamo Adam, every manner and every way that he used and held to repair his life from earthly necessities by building little houses covered with straw, and by raising narrow huts to defend himself from the inclemency of the Heaven, from the intemperance of the air, from the injuries of the times, and from the many harms of the earth, or to cover his body with various ignoble garments to drive away from himself the humid rains, the impetuosity of the winds, the fervent ardor of the Sun, and the bitterness of the cold; all this proceeded from the Mechanical art. To which does not happen what is wont to happen to the winds; which, issuing most vehemently from the concave centers where they are born, and with their forced fury splitting the mountains, opening the earth, breaking thick walls, felling high towers, and submerging the daubed ships in the vast sea, little by little weakened, lose their course and then vanish; but rather that which one often sees with the effects of the great rivers; which, being small in their birth, continuously growing however through the many tortuous streams that they receive into their bosom, the further they departed from their sources, the more with greater amplitude and abundance of water they discharge their liquid burdens into the sea: so and not otherwise has it happened to the Mechanical art.