Twelve doors in the dial opened successively and little balls dropping on brazen bells told the hour:  at noon a dozen mounted knights paraded the face and closed the portals.  Trithonius mentions an horologium presented in A.D. 1232 by Al-Malik al-Kamil the Ayyubite Soldan to the Emperor Frederick II:  like the Strasbourg and Padua clocks it struck the hours, told the day, month and year, showed the phases of the moon, and registered the position of the sun and the planets.  Towards the end of the fifteenth century Gaspar Visconti mentions in a sonnet the watch proper (certi orologii piccioli e portativi); and the “animated eggs” of Nurembourg became famous.  The earliest English watch (Sir Ashton Lever’s) dates from 1541:  and in 1544 the portable chronometer became common in France.

[FN#183] An illustrated History of Arms and Armour etc. (p. 59); London:  Bell and Sons, 1877.  The best edition is the Guide des Amateurs d’Armes, Paris:  Renouard, 1879.

[FN#184] Chapt. iv.  Dr. Gustav Oppert “On the Weapons etc. of the Ancient Hindus;” London:  Truebner and Co., 1880. : 

[FN#185] I have given other details on this subject in pp. 631- 637 of “Camoens, his Life and his Lusiads.”

[FN#186] The morbi venerei amongst the Romans are obscure because “whilst the satirists deride them the physicians are silent.”  Celsus, however, names (De obscenarum partium vitiis, lib. xviii.) inflammatio coleorum (swelled testicle), tubercula glandem (warts on the glans penis), cancri carbunculi (chancre or shanker) and a few others.  The rubigo is noticed as a lues venerea by Servius in Virg.  Georg.

[FN#187] According to David Forbes, the Peruvians believed that syphilis arose from connection of man and alpaca; and an old law forbade bachelors to keep these animals in the house.  Francks explains by the introduction of syphilis wooden figures found in the Chinchas guano; these represented men with a cord round the neck or a serpent devouring the genitals.

[FN#188] They appeared before the gates of Paris in the summer of 1427, not “about July, 1422”:  in Eastern Europe, however, they date from a much earlier epoch.  Sir J. Gilbert’s famous picture has one grand fault, the men walk and the women ride:  in real life the reverse would be the case.

[FN#189] Rabelais ii. c. 30.

[FN#190] I may be allowed to note that syphilis does not confine itself to man:  a charger infected with it was pointed out to me at Baroda by my late friend, Dr. Arnott (18th Regiment, Bombay N.I.) and Tangier showed me some noticeable cases of this hippic syphilis, which has been studied in Hungary.  Eastern peoples have a practice of “passing on” venereal and other diseases, and transmission is supposed to cure the patient; for instance a virgin heals (and catches) gonorrhoea.  Syphilis varies greatly with climate.  In Persia it is said to be propagated without contact:  in Abyssinia it is often fatal and in Egypt it is readily cured by sand baths and sulphur-unguents.  Lastly in lands like Unyamwezi, where mercurials are wholly unknown, I never saw caries of the nasal or facial bones.