and Description of the Eidograph. 425 



guiding and teaching me. This impression upon my mind was 

 so strong, that after twenty-seven years it appears as of yester- 

 day. Immediately on arising, giving thanks to God and my 

 tutelary angel, and being full of joy, I exclaimed often within 

 myself, 'zv^ko,, 'ev^fca, ! Then having fitted together four wooden 

 rods by means of needles, I took a picture of St Ignatius, and 

 drew it on paper, the copy being of like form, but on a larger 

 scale ; also, around this, and from the same picture, I carefully 

 drew others of a distorted proportion. All these, along with 

 the instrument I had invented, I sent to the before mentioned 

 painter, by the hands of a certain novice, Melchior Schenck, at 

 present Father of our Society, who was commissioned, along with 

 fifty other young men of my jurisdiction in the Monastery of St 

 Jerome, to ask and interrogate him, 1. Whether he knew or had 

 ever seen this kind of instrument ? 2. Whether he knew the 

 use of it, and could assign, at pleasure, points for the fixed centre, 

 for the tracer, and for the drawing pen ? 3. Whether from a 

 given picture he could draw an unlike distorted one ? 4. Whe- 

 ther from a distorted picture he could restore the symmetrical 

 one ? 5. Whether the picture shewn to him corresponded to 

 its original? 6. Whether he believed that this invention was 

 made by Master Scheiner ? 



" The painter on seeing the drawings and instrument, stood, 

 as they told me, mute and astonished for a quarter of an hour. At 

 length, recovering himself, he replied, That he had never seen a 

 similar instrument, nor knew its use : That the drawing pen, the 

 point of the tracer, and fixed centre in his compasses, were con- 

 nected with certain holes, besides which, he could not assign 

 others. He allowed that he had never seen distorted pictures, 

 being neither able to produce a distorted copy from a symmetri- 

 cal original, nor from such a copy to reproduce the original. He 

 admitted that the figure of the saint in the middle of the copy 

 shewn to him, corresponded most exactly with the picture. He 

 declared, lastly, his doubt if Mr Scheiner, without his previous 



