Salomon de Caus (1576–1626) was a hydraulic engineer and architect under King Louis XIII. He was renowned not only for his garden designs with magnificent waterworks, but also for his many publications on topics relating to the arts and sciences. In this influential work, de Caus sets out the principles of hydraulics on which the automata or trick fountains and water jokes in the seventeenth-century garden were based.
Publication date: 1615
The book can be accessed here:
archive.org/details/raisonsdesforce00Caus/page/n11/mode/2up 