Henry Dircks

“ Time was when wise men would have smiled and said, "A puff of steam—a mere puff of steam!"—and had some one, more sanguine than the rest, attempted by its application to produce a motion, he would have applied it to the floatboards of a wheel, as in Branca's engine, and have been disappointed. It is not given to man to know when the powers of any great agent have been fully developed ”

“ And, year by year, many such schemes, find their final resting place in the archives of the Patent Office.
It is melancholy to reflect on the waste of mental energy, inflicted on society by such vanities as Astrology, Alchemy, and their kindred empirical employments. Look at the centuries wasted, and worse than wasted, in studying such intellectual abortions, and in writing thousands of volumes of inanity to uphold falsehood and delude the unwary. What the sword has done physically, the pen and the wand of the sorcerer have done mentally, in prostrating the intellectuality of mankind. ”

“ It would be doing deep injustice to the Marquis of Worcester, to judge him in all respects rigidly by modern fashions, customs, and habits of thought. The modern critic, in simple ignorance of the age, might exclaim with just indignation against the promulgating an invention to cheat at dice. We have many examples to prove, that the Marquis was not singular in proposing so questionable an invention, and we can only consider such schemes put forth as marvels in themselves and warnings to the unwary. ”

“ It is possible to see a large extent of country from a lofty tower without being cognizant of every blade of grass, the perfume of blossoms, or the notes of the sweetest songsters of the groves. In like manner the popular lecturer has to present only so much to the eye of the mind as will give the prominent features of his theme, omitting those details over which the scholar, or the true lover of his subject, dwells with the affection of a fond parent over a darling child. ”

“ Mais le public n’y regarde pas de si près, et bien de gens ne renoncent pas sans douleur à la bonne fortune historique d’un homme de génie mourant à l’hôpital. Un sujet si bien trouvé revenait de droit aux ouvres de l’imagination et de l’art. On a vu, à l’une des expositions du Louvre, un tableau de l’un de nos peintres, M. Lecurieux, dans lequel Salomon de Caus, enfermé à Bicêtre, est représenté les yeux caves et la barbe hérissée, tendant les mains, à travers les barreux de sa prison, au couple brillant de Marion Delorme et du marquis. ”

“ It is much to be lamented that the learned did not examine more strictly into the merit of Orffyreus's wheel; but, on the contrary, being prepossessed with a notion of the impracticability of the perpetual motion, suffered it to be neglected, and at last destroyed by the hands of a disappointed mechanic, who, with unwearied application and steady perseverance, had brought it to perfection. I wish we may not again let slip an opportunity of becoming acquainted with an invention, which, when made public, will reflect honor on the inventor, and be of the utmost utility to the world. ”

“ His fate, it is true, was the general fate of hundreds of noble families, condemned in like manner to suffer for their loyalty. While we are prone to praise what is gained by a rebellion, we are apt to overlook whether the civil war entered upon for effecting it, might not have been avoided; and while lauding times which bring to light some great military and naval spirits or still greater statesmen, we overlook entirely the possibility of altogether destroying the mental energies of men of brighter intellects, doomed to fall in the flower of their age on the field of battle. ”

“ Whatever a man's intellectual pursuits may be, he has the advantage over the mere man of fashion of being engaged in employments which the longest life cannot exhaust.
But intellectual pursuits partake either of the negative or the positive; they are useful or useless, and when useless they fritter away and render nugatory the talent that might have been better employed.
The Marquis of Worcester affords an eminent example of genius of a high order, grandly and effectively directed towards the advancement of man's political and social position. ”

“ The proof that Conservation of Energy conforms to all other known phenomena of nature has been aided, and hastened by the refinement of scientific instruments by which forms of energy such as heat, electricity, and magnetism can be more delicately measured and determined than ever before, and if instruments for measuring and determining the amount of energy in its various forms were as crude as they were even a single century ago, it is probable Conservation of Energy would still be the undiscovered foundation of all natural phenomena. ”

“ The Marquis might well allude in his Century to “the melancholy which had lately seized upon him;” his sole desire being to pay his debts and possess “a competency to live according to his birth and quality;” yet every way frustrated, month by month, year by year, even after his last ray of hope was realized in the return of the exiled sovereign. He makes slight allusion to enemies, and none to public neglect. ”

“ For among all the laws of matter and motion, we know of none which seems to afford any principle or foundation for such an effect. Action and reaction are allowed to be ever equal; and a body which gives any quantity of motion to another, always loses just so much of its own; but, under the present state of things, the resistance of the air, and the friction of the parts of machines, necessarily retard every motion. ”

“ We may first observe that Astrology lays no claim to inspiration, but affects a very ancient unknown origin, tracing back to a dark, heathenish, and superstitious age, in the very infancy of traditional knowledge, when the boldest assertions of the seer were received as the authority of an oracle, no one daring to question their validity. Whatever is remotely possible the Astrologer accepts as a fact; while ignorant of much around him, he assumes with the utmost complacency an intimate acquaintance with the sun and planets thousands upon thousands of miles off ”

“ We have thus far traced the career of the Marquis of Worcester from youth to manhood; the scholar, husband, father, general of armies, a wealthy nobleman, an impoverished exile, in danger of his life by war and shipwreck, twice imprisoned, now a freeman, oppressed by pecuniary difficulties and earnestly striving against the pressure of his own misfortunes and the weight of public prejudice, to which his political life and religious persuasion subjected him: sometimes through court intrigue, but mostly from the rooted bigotry of those gloomy times. ”

“ Under heaven is not such an art, more promoting the honour of God, more conducing to mankind, and more narrowly searching into the most profound secrets of nature, than is our true and more than laudable Chymy. ”

“ The red hand and unpitying slaughter of war are only shadowed forth to us like shapeless forms, creations of the imagination rather than even faint pictures of reality. His Lordship’s naturally studious habits would seem to have incapacitated him from entering ardently into the wanton destruction of human life and the infliction of severe injuries on multitudes, regarded by him more as deluded neighbours than cruel adversaries. ”

“ If the doctrine of Conservation of Energy be true about which there seems to be no doubt, then all hopes of ever attaining Perpetual Motion must cease, for the idea of Perpetual Motion is predicated and has its foundation upon the creation of energy. The mechanism must give more energy than is imparted to it. It must make energy, and this in the light of the generalized truth of Conservation of Energy is an impossibility. We might as well talk about making substance, and the creation of substance, or the creation of energy either one is not an attribute of man. ”

“ The History of Science from the days of Archimedes presents a vast phalanx of men mighty in genius; but foremost in this intellectual group ranks the Marquis of Worcester, the originality, independence, and grandeur of whose mechanical conceptions have acquired a world-wide celebrity; for he it was who first evoked that Titanic power, which, through successive improvements, consequent on the accumulated ingenuity of two hundred years, has given to the present age the modern Steam-engine. ”

“ We must look with astonishment at a man of noble birth, who in a period of civil commotion, with a monarch for his friend, and a court at his command, secluded himself during his youth in a stately ancient tower, engaged in abstruse studies and wonderful mechanical operations; and who, late in life, amidst the terrors of civil war was found turning his inventive faculties, like another Archimedes, to the construction of means of defence, and terrible weapons of offence. ”

“ While, however, everybody else is viewing the engine of Savery’s reputed invention with astonishment, Savery himself is present to our mind only as a cold calculating man, proud, not of being a Captain over Mines, but of being designated “Gentleman;” and while thus precise to inform the world of his gentility, he leaves us in perfect ignorance of his mental acquirements, or the origin of the marvellous engine. It may appear to some, that his exhibiting of the model before the Royal Society is at once evidence of straightforwardness and uprightness of conduct. ”