The works of Edgar Allan Poe; newly collected and edited, with a memoir, critical introductions, and notes, by Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry; the illustrations by Albert Edward Sterner.

TALES OF PSEUDO-SCIENCE

these magi constructed (of like material) a creature
that put to shame even the genius of him who made
it; for so great were its reasoning powers that, in a
second, it performed calculations of so vast an extent
that they would have required the united labor of fifty
thousand fleshy men for a year.1 But a still more
wonderful conjurer fashioned for himself a mighty
thing that was neither man nor beast, but which had
brains of lead, intermixed with a black matter like
pitch, and fingers that it employed with such incredible
speed and dexterity that it would have had no trouble
in writing out twenty thousand copies of the Koran in
an hour; and this with so exquisite a precision that in
all the copies there should not be found one to vary
from another by the breadth of the finest hair. This
thing was of prodigious strength, so that it erected or
overthrew the mightiest empires at a breath; but its
powers were exercised equally for evil and for good.'"
"Ridiculous! " said the king.
"'Among this nation of necromancers there was
also one who had in his veins the blood of the salamanders; for he made no scruple of sitting down to
smoke his chibouk in a red-hot oven until his dinner
was thoroughly roasted upon its floor.2 Another had
the faculty of converting the common metals into
gold, without even looking at them during the process.8
Another had such a delicacy of touch that he made
a wire so fine as to be invisible.4 Another had such
1 Babbage's Calculating Machine.
2 Chabert, and since him, a hundred others.
8 The Electrotype.
4 Wollaston made of platinum for the field of views in a tele.
scope a wire one eighteen-thousandth part of an inch in thickness.
It could be seen only by means of the microscope.
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