THE MOST MURDEROUS MACHINE.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VI, Issue 9, 11 January 1871, Page 4

THE MOST MURDEROUS MACHINE.

o — - — A correspondent of the Glasgoio Weekly Herald sends the following communication : — I saw a paragraph from the Gaulois in your columns this morning, proposing that " The man who shall invent the most murderous machine, and the one easiest to use and handle, shall receive from the (French) nation a prize of 500,000 francs," and having now before me, a few hours afterwards, by chance, Lord Buchan's life of our immortal countryman, Napier of Merchistoun, the inventor of logarithms, born 1550, died 1617, I find the following note, which is so entirely apropos, but with a golden lesson of humanity added which I am afaid may not be thought so suitable at the present moment in Paris, that I cannot resist the inclination to transcribe the whole as fit for publication in the Herald. Lord Buchan himself quotes from Sir Thomas Urquhart's Tracts (Edinburgh, 1774), who states that Napier had "an almost incomprehensible device, which, being in the mouths of the most of Scotland, and yet unknown to any that ever wae in the world but himself, deserveth very well to be taken notice of in this place, and it is this — he had the skill, as it ig commonly reported, to frame an engine which, by virtue of some secret springs, inward resorts with other implements and materials fit for the purpose, enclosed within tbe bowels thereof, had the power (if proportionable in bulk to tbe action required of it — for he could make it of aU sizes; to clear a field of four miles in circumference of all the living creatures exceeding a foot in height, that should be found thereon, how near soever they might be found to one another ; by which means he made it appear that he was able, with the help of thi§ machine alone, to kill thirty thousand Turks, without the hazard of one Christian ! " Of this it is said (continues li is Lordship), that on a wager, he gave proof upon a large plain in Scotland, to the destruction of a great many head of caftle and flocks of sheep, whereof some were distant' from others, half a mile on all sides, and some a whole

mile (But) "when he was most earnestly desired by an old. acquaintance and professed friend of his, even about the time of his contracting the disease whereof he died, that he would be pleased, for the honor of his family and his own everlasting memory to posterity, to reveal unto him the manner of the contrivance of so ingenious a mystery, subjoining thereto, for the better persuading him, that it were a thousand pities that so excellent an invention should be buried with him in the grave, and that after his decease nothing should be kuown thereof — his answer was, that for the ruin and overthrow of man there weret oo many devices already framed, which if he could make to be fewer he would with all his might endeavor to do ; and that therefore, seeing the malice and rancor rooted iv the heart of mankind will not suffer them to diminish the number of them, by any new concert of his they should never be it-creased." "Divinely spoken, truly," adds hi 3 Lordship ; aud divinely, say we. Yet this was precisely the sort of machine, * tbe most murderous and the most easily handled" at present in request at Paris, ar.d would have " cleared" whole suburbs "of all living creatures exceeding a foot in heighth," with a celerity and aim almost miraculous. What a loss to French humanity and civilisation, as typfied there by mitrailleuses aud petroleum and sub phuric acid, lias the loss or. that invention been ! But there was more humauity and civilisation, I suspect, in the divinely rude old Scotchman's heart at Merchistoun, l ban has been illustrated in Europe, including Franc**, fur the last two hundred years.