A History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins, Volume I (of 2)

1484

Comment. Soc. Götting. 1781, iv. p. 20.

1485

Briefe, p. 30.

1486

Beytrage zu der Abhand. v. Edelsteinen. Bruns. 1778, 8vo, p. 55.

1487

Mathesius, in his tenth Sermon, p. 501, where he speaks of the cadmia fossilis, says, “Ye miners call it kobolt; the Germans call the black devil, and the old devil’s whores and hags, old and black kobel, which by their witchcraft do injury to people and to their cattle.”… Whether the devil, therefore, and his hags gave this name to cobalt, or cobalt gave its name to witches, it is a poisonous and noxious metal. Agricola, De Animantibus Subterraneis, says, at the end, “Dæmones, quos Germanorum alii, aut etiam Græci, vocant cobalos, quod hominum sunt imitatores.” Bochart, in his Canaan, i. 18, p. 484, gives a Hebrew derivation of κόβαλος. It appears to be the same as covalus and gobelinus, the latter of which was used by Ordericus Vitalis in the eleventh century as the name of a spirit or phantom. See Menage, Diction. Etymol. i. 681.

1488

Sammlung zur Sächsischen Geschichte, iv. p. 363.

1489

Melzer’s Berglauftige Beschreibung der Stadt Schneeberg, 1684, 4to, p. 405. The same account is given in his Historia Schneebergensis, 1716, 4to. In these works one may see the dispositions made from time to time by the electors of Saxony, to support this highly profitable manufacture. The latest information on this subject is to be found in Hoffmann’s Abhandlung über die Eisenhütten, Hof. 1785, 4to.

1490

Cadmiologia, i. p. 14.

1491

Speculum Metallurgiæ Politissimum. Dresden, 1700, fol. p. 165.

1492

I say, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, on the authority of the following information in Melzer, which seems not to have been noticed by others: – “Peter Weidenhammer, a Franconian, came hither poor; but by means of a colour he procured from pounded bismuth, and of which he exported many quintals to Venice, at the rate of twenty-five dollars per quintal, he soon acquired great riches, and built a beautiful house in the market-place. His name is inscribed in the lower window of the chancel of the great church, with the date 1520.” At that period a great deal of this paint was prepared at Venice, and it may therefore be easily comprehended how Vannuccio could be so early acquainted with zaffera.

1493

How early manufactories for blue paint were erected beyond the boundaries of Saxony and Bohemia I do not know, as I have found no information on that subject. We are however told by Calvor, in Beschreibung des Maschinenwesens am Oberharze, ii. p. 202, that a person was engaged to superintend the blue-paint-manufactory at St. Andreasberg in the year 1698.

1494

Meisnische Bergchronik, p. 133, tit. 16.

1495

Lib. v. De Subtil.

1496

Lib. ii. cap. 55.

1497

Magiæ Naturalis lib. vi.

1498

De Arte Vitriaria. Amst. 1668, 12mo, lib i. cap. 12, p. 32.

1499

Ibid. p. 327.

1500

Glasmacherkunst. Nurnb. 1743, 4to, p. 46.

1501

Act. Lit. et Scient. Upsal, 1733. Wallerii Syst. Min. ii. p. 164.

1502

The principal works in which information may be found on this subject, are Perrault in Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences depuis 1666 jusqu’à 1699. – Traité de la Police, par De la Mare, ii. p. 726. – Buffon, Hist. Nat. – Pallas, Spicilegia Zoologica, fascic. iv. p. 10. – Pennant, in the Philosophical Transactions, vol. lxxi. part i. p. 72. – Pennant’s Arctic Zoology, vol. ii. – Miscellanies by Daines Barrington. London, 1781, 4to, p. 127.

1503

Athenæus, Deip. lib. xiv. p. 655. Most of those passages of the ancients in which this fowl is mentioned have been collected by Gesner, in his Histor. Avium, p. 461, and by Aldrovandus in his Ornithologia, lib. xiii. p. 18. When we consider the feathers as delineated by Perrault, we shall find the comparison of Clytus more intelligible than it has appeared to many commentators.

1504

Plin. Strabo. The following passage of the Periplus Scylacis, p. 122, which I have never found cited in the history of the meleagrides, is worthy of remark. This geographer, speaking of a lake in the Carthaginian marshes, says, “Circa lacum nascitur arundo, cyperus, stœbe et juncus. Ibi meleagrides aves sunt; alibi vero nusquam nisi inde exportatæ.”

1505

Columella, viii. 2, 2, p. 634.

1506

I have here quoted nothing more than what I thought requisite to prove that the meleagrides of the ancients were our Guinea fowls, because I had no intention of treating fully on a subject which has been handled by so many others; and because I had only to show that they were not turkeys. Had not this been the case, it would have been necessary for me to collect into one point of view everything that the ancients have said of these fowls, with the words used by the different writers. It may however be said, that by this mode of examining a disputed point, a mode indeed practised by many, the reader may be led to an ill-founded approbation, because what is not agreeable to the author’s assertion may be easily concealed. But this observation is not applicable to me; for I confess that I do not know with certainty whether the Guinea fowls are as careless of their young as the meleagrides are said to have been; whether their cry, which I have often enough heard, and which is indeed unpleasant, agrees with the κακκάζειν of Pollux, v. § 90; and whether the ἀλεκτρυόνες μεγέθει μέγιστοι, mentioned in Ælian’s Hist. Animal, xvi. 2, belong to the Guinea fowls, or, as Pennant will have it, to the Pavones bicalcarati.

1507

Kennet’s Parochial Antiquities, p. 287. The meleagrides also, which Volateran saw at Rome in 1510, were of the same kind.

1508

Sommario dell’ Ind. Occid. cap. 3. In the third volume of the Collection of Voyages by Ramusio, Oviedo describes them with great minuteness, which it is unlikely he would have done had these fowls been so well known in Europe as Barrington thinks they were.