TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 183 
_ (8.) The body swimming partly supported. 
. (a.) On skins (Nineveh marbles) or gourds (Barth’s African Travels). 
: (6.) On a rope (Memoirs of Missionaries in China). 
(c.) On a piece of ice (R. Valturius, a.p. 1472). 
(d.) On reeds (as now in Egypt or in Tartary), where a bundle of reeds is tied to 
a horse’s tail while the rider holds his head, swimming (Churchill's Voyages, 
vol. i. p. 463). 
_ (4.) The body floating out of the water and propelled. 
(a.) By the hand paddling (as in China*). 
(d.) By the hand working a pole with which to push or punt, or an oar to paddle, 
scull or row with. 
Mandan Indians’ tub-shaped boat, rowed by a woman drawing a shovel-like oar 
inwards. 
A similar oar used like a mud-rake on the Rhine. 
Single oars with a sculling motion were used in Nineveh, Egypt and China, and 
some of them had twenty rowers to each. 
Double-bladed paddles were uncommon in Egypt. They are represented in an old 
Japanese Dictionary in thirteen volumes, in the British Museum, and in Nicolo’s 
Voyage in Greenland (a.p. 1380). 
Two oars worked by one man were used in the ancient British coracle, but not often 
in Egypt or Nineveh. 
A curious plan, wholly disused now, is shown in Lepsius, Denkmaeler aus Egypten, 
&c., by which Egyptian rowers stood facing the outside of the boat and swinging 
sideways, while each held two oars nearly vertical, on the same side of the boat}. 
Pin rowlocks and oar-slings were used in Egypt; and the men stood or sat at the 
oar with one leg raised on a midriff platform f. 
(Oars have been worked by machinery moved by wind, water, rolling of the vessel, 
weights, springs, and steam.) One of the ships Columbus used in his veyage to 
America was propelled by thirty-eight oars. (A drawing is in ‘ Columbus’ Letters,’ 
A.D. 1493.) 
“« Edgar was rowed on the Dee by eight tributary kingss.” 
es eee nnn eee 
Se 
(B.) Muscular power of animals. 
(a.) Vessels towed by animals. In Leopold’s ‘ Theatrum’ is a sketch of a man in 
a boat holding a plough drawn by horses in shallow water. Barges were 
until lately drawn on the river Cam by horses walking in the centre of the 
stream. 
I. Three Egyptian paintings represent (not clearly) an ox harnessed to oars. 
IJ. Propulsion by forcing jets of water was patented twenty times before a.p. 1830, 
although Dr. Allen had proposed to apply the steam-engine thus a hundred years 
before. 
III. Other useless plans employed gunpowder, clockwork, kites or windmills, and 
one (4.p. 1827) had a drum packed with sponges, which were to move by the weight 
of water lifted on one side by capillary attraction, and squeezed out at the other by a 
lever'|. 
_ IV. Omitting chapelets and endless chains, of which innumerable applications 
were made, we may notice the more practical use of Paddle-wheels. They are 
wrongly suppesed to have been used in Egypt and Nineveh, and to have been de- 
picted by Vitruvius]; but they are shown in R. Valturius (a.p. 1472) and Pancirol- 
Tus (a.p. 1587). 
A Chinese drawing of a paddle-wheel vessel is perhaps 600 years old**. 
English patents on the subject prepared by the author of this paper, and published by Her 
Majesty’s Commissioners of Patents. It will be hereafter referred to by the letters M. P.) 
_ * See M. P., p. 2. + M. P., p. 2, note. 
{ These descriptions can scarcely be made intelligible without the drawings that accom- 
panied them. 
_ § Selden, Mar Claus., fol. 258. 
|| M.P., p. 85. About 900 patents have been granted in Great Britain for inventions 
‘relating to the propulsion of ships. 
 ¥ M. P., p. 7, note (d). ** M.P., p. 5. 
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