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 couscoussou,* 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 B. c. Perhaps it may be difficult, not 



* This Tcuskus, 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.D. 622 ; about which time, 

 as tradition has it, it was invented by Mahomet when his health 

 required wholesome and savoury food. Translatw*. 



