Page:The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy (Volume 8).pdf/83

 in the year 1343, which was full thirty seven years before that time, the secret of powder was well known, and employed with success, both by Moors and Christians, not only in their sea-combats, at that period, but in many of their most memorable sieges in Spain and Barbary—And all the world knows, that Friar Bacon had wrote expressly about it, and had generously given the world a receipt to make it by, above a hundred and fifty years before even Schwartz was born—And that the Chinese, added my uncle Toby, embarass us, and all accounts of it still more, by boasting of the invention some hundreds of years even before him

—They are a pack of liars, I believe, cried Trim