Philosophical Amusements

Easy recreations for young people from the French writer who exposed the conjurers of his day. Number divinations, card tricks and optical experiments, each set out step by step with the method explained. English edition, London, 1790.

What’s inside

1. Number tricks — counters in each hand, a number thought of, the magical century
2. Puzzles and problems — the blind abbess and her nuns, thirty soldiers in a ring, the hundred-sheep pen
3. Divinations — three persons and three things, a name thought of, the hour on a watch
4. Card tricks — pips on drawn cards, the ten duplicates, the two convertible aces
5. Weights, measures and balances — dividing the wine, the least weights, a false balance, good or bad money
6. Mechanical recreations — the stick on two wine glasses, a peg for three holes, a pyramid that moves
7. Legerdemain and automata — the two convertible coins, the two communicative busts, the oracular head
8. Secret writing and ciphers
9. Optical experiments — optical augmentation and subtraction, an artificial rainbow, the concave mirror
10. Hydraulic experiments — the magical bottle, the miraculous vessel, Tantalus’s cup
11. Chemical experiments — the tree of Diana, Prince Rupert’s drop, colour-changing liquors, the revived rose
12. Sympathetic inks — the book of fate, transcoloured writing, oracular letters, winter changed to spring
13. Storms, thunder and electricity — an artificial tempest, thunder and lightning, Mr. Symmer’s silk stockings

Henri Decremps, 1790. Complete 93-page PDF. Free to download: check out at $0 and the file arrives by email and on your order page.

This classic is in the public domain. Scans come from library copies, so expect the odd stain or stamp of an old book.