equally active in all climates, and will do work of any kind; it is a water-pumper, a miner, a sailor, a cotton-spinner, a weaver, a blacksmith, a miller, &c. &c.; and a small engine, in the character of a steam pony, may be seen dragging after it, on a railroad, a hundred tons of merchandise, or a regiment of soldiers, with greater speed than that of our fleetest coaches. It is the king of machines, and a permanent realization of the Genii of eastern fable, whose supernatural powers were occasionally at the command of man."

In addition to those difficulties which his unrivalled mechanical ingenuity enabled him to surmount, Watt, notwithstanding the merit of his inventions, had to contend for some time with others of a different nature, in his attempts to reduce them to practice. He had no pecuniary resources of his own, and was at first without any friend willing to run the risk of the outlay necessary for an experiment on a sufficiently large scale. At last he applied to Dr. Roebuck, an ingenious and spirited speculator, who had just established the Carron iron-works, not far from Glasgow, and held also at this time a lease of the extensive coal-works at Kinneal, the property of the Duke of Hamilton. Dr. Roebuck agreed to advance the requisite funds on having two thirds of the profits made over to him; and upon this Mr. Watt took out his first patent in the beginning of the year 1769. An engine with a cylinder of eighteen inches diameter was soon after erected at Kinneal; and although, as a first experiment, it was necessarily in some respects of defective construction, its working completely demonstrated the great value of Watt's improvements. But Dr. Roebuck, whose undertakings were very numerous and various, in no long time after forming this connection, found himself involved in such pecuniary difficulties, as to put it out of his power to make any farther advances in prosecution of its object. ́ On this, Watt employed himself for some years almost entirely to the ordinary work of his profession as a civil engineer; but at last, about the year 1774, when all hopes of any farther assistance from Dr. Roebuck were at an end, he resolved to close with a proposal which had been made to him through his friend Dr. Small, of Birmingham, that he should remove to that town, and enter into partnership with the eminent hardware manufacturer, Mr. Boulton, whose extensive establishment at Soho had already become famous over Europe, and procured for England an unrivalled reputation for the arts there carried on. Accordingly, an arrangement having been made with Dr. Roebuck, by which his share of the patent was transferred to Mr. Boulton, the firm of Boulton and Watt commenced the business of making steam engines in the year 1775.

Mr. Watt now obtained from parliament an extension of his patent for twenty-five years from this date, in consideration of the acknowledged national importance of his inventions. The first thing which he and his partner did, was to erect an engine at Soho, which they invited all persons interested in such machines to inspect. They then proposed to erect similar engines wherever required, on the very liberal principle of receiving as payment for each, only one third of the saving in fuel which it should effect, as compared with one of the old construction. As this saving, how. ever, had been found to amount in the whole to fully three fourths of all the fuel that had been wont to be employed, the revenue thus accruing to the patentees became very great after their engines were extensively adopted. This they very soon were, especially in Cornwall, where the numerous mines afforded a vast field for the employment of the new power, partly in continuing or commencing works which only an economized expenditure could make profitable, and often also in labors which the old engine was alto. gether inadequate to attempt.

But the draining of mines was only one of many applications of the steam power now at his command which Watt contemplated, and in course of time accomplished. During the whole twentyfive years, indeed, over which his renewed patent extended, the perfecting of his invention was his chief occupation; and, notwithstanding a delicate state of health, and the depressing affliction of severe headaches to which he was extremely subject, he continued throughout this period to persevere with unwearied diligence in adding new improvements to the mechanism of the engine, and devising the means of applying it to new purposes of usefulness. He devoted, in particular, the exertions of many years to the contriving of the best methods of making the action of the piston communicate a rotary motion in various circumstances; and between the years 1781 and 1785 he took out four different patents for inventions having this object in view. In the midst of these scientific labors, too, his attention was much distracted by attempts which were made in several quarters to pirate his improvements, and the consequent necessity of defending his rights in a series of actions, which, notwithstanding successive verdicts in his favor, did not terminate till the year 1799, when the validity of his claims was finally confirmed by the unanimous decision of the Judges of the Court of King's Bench.

Watt's inexhaustible ingenuity displayed itself in various other contrivances besides those which make part of his steam engine. An apparatus for copying letters and other writings, now in extensive use; a method of heating houses by steam; a new composi

tion, for the purposes of sculpture, having the transparency and nearly the hardness of marble; a machine for multiplying copies of busts and other performances in carving or statuary, are enumerated among his minor inventions. But it is his steamengine that forms the great monument of his genius, and that has conferred upon his name its imperishable renown. This invention has already gone far to revolutionize the whole domain of human industry; and almost every year is adding to its power and its conquests. In our manufactures, our arts, our commerce, our social accommodations, it is constantly achieving what, little more than half a century ago, would have been accounted miracles and impossibilities. "The trunk of an elephant, it has been finely and truly said, that can pick up a pin, or rend an oak, is as nothing to it. It can engrave a seal, and crush masses of obdurate metal like wax before it, draw out, without breaking, a thread as fine as gossamer, and lift a ship of war like a bauble in the air. It can embroider muslin and forge anchors; cut steal into ribbands, and impel loaded vessels against the fury of the winds and waves.

Locomotives, under the impetus communicated by this, the most potent, and at the same time the most perfectly controllable of all our mechanical agencies, have already been drawn forward at the flying speed of thirty and forty miles an hour. If so much has been done already, it would be rash to conclude that even this is to be our ultimate limit of attainment. In navigation, the resistance of the water, which increases rapidly as the force opposed to it increases, very soon sets bounds to the rate at which even the power of steam can impel a vessel forward. But, on land, the thin medium of the air presents no such insurmountable obstacle to a force making its way through it; and a rapidity of movement may perhaps be eventually attained here, which is to us even as yet inconceivable. But even when the rate of land travelling already shown to be quite practicable shall have become universal, in what a new state of society shall we find ourselves! When we shall be able to travel a hundred miles in any direction in six or eight hours, into what comparative neighborhood will the remotest extremes even of a large country be brought, and how little shall we think of what we now call distance! A nation will then be indeed a community; and all the benefits of the highest civilization, instead of being confined to one central spot, will be diffused equally over the land, like the light of heaven. This improvement, in short, when fully consummated, will confer upon man nearly as much new power and new enjoyment as if he were actually endowed with wings.

It is gratifying to reflect that even while he was yet alive, Watt

received from the voice of the most illustrious of his contemporaries the honors due to his genius. In 1785 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; the degree of Doctor of Laws was conferred upon him by the University of Glasgow in 1806; and in 1808 he was elected a member of the French Institute. He died on the 25th of August, 1819, in the 84th year of his age. We cannot better conclude our sketch of the life of this great inventor than by the following extract from the character that has been drawn of him by the eloquent writer, (Mr. Jeffrey,) whom we have already quoted. “Independently of his great attainments in mechanics, Mr. Watt was an extraordinary, and in many respects a wonderful man. Perhaps no individual in his age possessed so much and such varied and exact information,-had read so much, or remembered what he had read so accurately and well. He had infinite quickness of apprehension, a prodigious memory, and a certain rectifying and methodizing power of understanding, which extracted something precious out of all that was presented to it. His stores of miscellaneous knowledge were immense, and yet less astonishing than the command he had at all times over them. It seemed as if every subject that was casually started in conversation, had been that which he had been last occupied in studying and exhausting; such was the copiousness, the precision, and the admirable clearness of the information which he poured out upon it without effort or hesitation. Nor was this prompti. tude and compass of knowledge confined in any degree to the studies connected with his ordinary pursuits. That he should have been minutely and extensively skilled in chemistry and the arts, and in most of the branches of physical science, might perhaps have been conjectured; but it could not have been inferred from his usual occupations, and probably is not generally known, that he was curiously learned in many branches of antiquity, metaphysics, medicine, and etymology, and perfectly at home in all the details of architecture, music, and law. He was well acquainted, too, with most of the modern languages, and familiar with their most recent literature. Nor was it at all extraordinary to hear the great mechanician and engineer detailing and expounding, for hours together, the metaphysical theories of the German logicians, or criticising the measures or the matter of the German poetry.

"His astonishing memory was aided, no doubt, in a great measure, by a still higher and rarer faculty-by his power of digesting and arranging in its proper place all the information he received, and of casting aside and rejecting, as it were instinc. tively, whatever was worthless or immaterial. Every conception

that was suggested to his mind seemed instantly to take its piace among its other rich furniture, and to be condensed into the smallest and most convenient form. He never appeared, therefore, to be at all encumbered or perplexed with the verbiage of the dull books he perused, or the idle talk to which he listened; but to have at once extracted, by a kind of intellectual alchemy, all that was worthy of attention, and to have reduced it for his own use to its true value and to its simplest form. And thus it often happened, that a great deal more was learned from his brief and vigorous account of the theories and arguments of tedious writers, than an ordinary student could ever have derived from the most faithful study of the originals, and that errors and absurdities became manifest from the mere clearness and plainness of his statement of them, which might have deluded and perplexed most of his hearers without that invaluable assistance."

JAMES BRINDLEY.

JAMES BRINDLEY, the celebrated engineer, was entirely selftaught in even the rudiments of mechanical science, although, unfortunately, we are not in possession of any very minute details of the manner in which his powerful genius first found its way to the knowledge of those laws of nature of which it afterwards made so many admirable applications. He was born at Tunsted, in the parish of Wormhill, Derbyshire, in the year 1716; and all we know of the first seventeen years of his life is, that his father, having reduced himself to extreme poverty by his dissipated habits, he was allowed to grow up almost totally uneducated, and, from the time he was able to do any thing, was employed in the ordinary descriptions of country labor. To the end of his life this great genius was barely able to read on any very pressing occasion; for, generally speaking, he would no more have thought of looking into a book for any information he wanted, than of seeking for it in the heart of a millstone: and his knowledge of the art of writing hardly extended farther than the accomplishment of signing his name. It is probable, that as he grew towards manhood, he began to feel himself created for higher things than driving a cart or following a plough; and we may even venture to conjecture, that the particular bias of his genius towards mechanical invention had already disclosed itself, when,