![]() He might have a penchant for winning souls by means of his Chess skill, but seemed in a general way an honest fellow enough, and one not likely to be guilty of any trick or subterfuge. Before him was an ordinary Chess table, and his attitude as he sat upon a cushion was perfectly natural. Monsieur Mephisto, such we were informed was the name, is a slim personage, with well shaped hands, and his one human foot was also of a neat proportion. Having been invited to a private view, we willingly accepted the offer, and on arriving at the inventor's house, were shewn into a room where sat a being, one of whose feet suggested alarming ideas, but he had, nevertheless, not a very unkindly expression of countenance. He has, as he informs us, been working at the notion for the last seven years, there being various difficulties to surmount, but his efforts have been at last rewarded with success, and a creature has been produced whose first public appearance will be at the Paris Exhibition. He conceived the idea of constructing a genuine automaton, if we may call it so, for he himself refuses to give it that name perhaps his scruples will be met by calling the article a machine-figure. This want is apparently claimable by a gentleman not unknown in Chess circles, and noted in the mechanical world for various ingenious inventions. ![]() Now it is evident that a lay figure constructed with such bona fide skill as that, while guided by an outward will only, it should be able to play at Chess, would be a different affair altogether. So considered, there is nothing in them worthy of notice, and the only wonder is, that for more than a hundred years there have never been wanting persons who have looked upon them as wonderful. However, no one now denies that Wolfgang de Kempelen's world famous automaton was directed by a person inside, and we take leave to place all later Chess playing machines in the same category. To the eye of common sense they bore the outward signs of an interior man, but credulity refused to accept such an obvious and therefore unsatisfactory explanation of what it persisted in holding to be a mystery.
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