engaged failed him; his ingenuity was baffled, his work stood still;
and in poring again and again over the learned manuscripts--alas! now
lost--in which certain German doctors had sought to explain the
pregnant hints of Roger Bacon, he found it inculcated that the axle of
a certain wheel must be composed of a diamond. Now, in truth, it so
happened that Adam's contrivance, which (even without the appliances
which were added in illustration of the theory) was infinitely more
complicated than modern research has found necessary, did not even
require the wheel in question, much less the absent diamond; it
happened, also, that his understanding, which, though so obtuse in
common life, was in these matters astonishingly clear, could not trace
any mathematical operations by which the diamond axle would in the
least correct the difficulty that had suddenly started up; and yet the
accursed diamond began to haunt him,--the German authority was so
positive on the point, and that authority had in many respects been
accurate. Nor was this all,--the diamond was to be no vulgar diamond;
it was to be endowed, by talismanic skill, with certain properties and
virtues; it was to be for a certain number of hours exposed to the
rays of the full moon; it was to be washed in a primitive and wondrous
elixir, the making of which consumed no little of the finest gold.
This diamond was to be to the machine what the soul is to the body,--a
glorious, all-pervading, mysterious principle of activity and life.
Such were the dreams that obscured the cradle of infant science! And
Adam, with all his reasoning powers, big lore in the hard truths of
mathematics, was but one of the giant children of the dawn. The
magnificent phrases and solemn promises of the mystic Germans got firm
hold of his fancy. Night and day, waking or sleeping, the diamond,
basking in the silence of the full moon, sparkled before his eyes.
Meanwhile all was at a stand. In the very last steps of his discovery
he was arrested. Then suddenly looking round for vulgar moneys to