ee 
EARLY USE OF STEAM. 867 
now presents the realization of several capital ideas, but 
each quite distinct, that could not have proceeded from 
one and the same source, and of which it is our duty 
carefully to seek out the origin and date. 
If having made any use whatever of steam, as it has 
been asserted, gave a right to figure in its history, we 
ought to quote the Arabs in the first place; because 
from time immemorial, their principal food, the flour of 
maize, which they call cowscoussou,* has been cooked 
by steam in cullenders placed over rustic boilers. Such 
an instance suffices to show up the ludicrous nature of 
the principle whence it results. 
Our countryman Gerbert, the same who wore the 
tiara as Sylvester II., does he acquire more real claims 
when, about the middle of the ninth century, he made 
the tubes of an organ in the Cathedral of Rheims resound 
by means of steam from water? I think not; in the 
embryo Pope’s instruments I perceive a current of steam 
substituted for a current of common air, to produce the 
usual musical phenomenon from the organ pipes; but by 
no means a mechanical effect, properly so called. 
The first example of motion generated by steam is to 
be found in a toy still older than Gerbert’s organ ; in an 
eolipyle by Hero of Alexandria, the date of which is as 
far back as 120 8.c. Perhaps it may be difficult, not 
* This kishis, or cuscasou, is a very nutritious dish; it consists of 
corn paste crumbled and put into an earthen cullender over a boiling 
pot in which meat or fowls, with ochra (pisum ochrus) and other vege- 
tables, are stewing; and which is luted or stopped close round the 
junction. The contents of the cullender are therefore dressed by 
steam. How ancient this mode of cooking may be we know not, but 
the Arabs only go back to the flight in a.p. 622; about which time, 
as tradition has it, it was invented by Mahomet when his health 
required wholesome and savoury food.— Translator. 
