Note A — THE STEAM FIRE ENGINE

Note.—We are told that some of these syringes are preserved in one or two of the parish churches. It can excite no surprise that London should have been almost wholly destroyed in the great fire of 1666, when such were the machines upon which the inhabitants chiefly depended for protecting their property and dwellings. If the diminutive size of these instruments be considered, the number of hands required to work each, beside others to carry water and vessels for them, the difficulty and often impossibility of approaching sufficiently near so as to reach the flames with the jet, the loss of part of the stream at the beginning and end of each stroke of the piston, and the trifling effect produced—the whole act of using them, appears rather as a farce. These primitive devices were known as “hand squirts.”