owe the invention of the digester and the safety-valve. Captain T. Savery, about 1698, invented an engine, in which steam was employed to give a force for the draining of mines or fens, the propulsion of water through mansions and palaces, and pumping it from ships. Amontons, in 1699, proposed a fire-wheel; but this, though ingenious in conception, was liable to many derangements, and was found impracticable.

Dr. André Dalesme, in 1705, exhibited at Paris an engine for raising water by the force of steam; and Leibnitz, after examining Savery's mechanisms in England, sent a sketch of one of them to Papin, who renewed his attempts to make an effective working engine. Upon the basis of Savery's machine, Thomas Newcomen and John Cawley, the former a blacksmith, and the latter a glazier in Dartmouth, constructed an engine upon Papin's principle of a piston and a condensing process, using, however, Savery's mode of creating a vacuum by cold affusion, for which they were led by an accident to substitute the method of throwing a jet or stream of cold water into the cylinder. Further improvements were made upon this engine by Desaguliers, Henry Beighton, of Newcastleon-Tyne, John Smeaton, and others, but none of these engines employed the direct force of steam as their motive power, and none of the improvers made any alteration in or advance upon the principles of steam mechanism. These engines, therefore, have been designated, for distinction's sake, atmospheric steam engines. All the elements of a successful adaptation of steam to industrial purposes might now be said to have been gathered together, but, like the dry bones in Ezekiel's vision, they required a Divine breath to give them the life of usefulness. At length came the hour, and with the hour "The master hand

That seized the fire-flame, like Prometheus old,
And, out the black shaft, through the grassy land,
Dragged up the iron from earth's rocky hold,
And gave command to both. Ye shall not rest
Till striving man is from work's bondage free.
Go, steam, and do man's hest; from east to west,
Ye wheels of iron, at his bidding flee."

The following résumé of the chief steps through which the invention had by this time passed will be found not only intelligible and interesting, but authoritative. "S. de Caus made steam act to raise water; Worcester performed this operation in a more regular and mechanical manner; Papin used the condensation of steam, and, through that, the atmospheric pressure, as well as the direct expansive force, and he worked the engine by a piston; Savery condensed by refrigeration, instead of the mere absence of fire, but did not use the atmosphere; Newcomen used the jet for condensing, and the atmosphere for pressure, but did not use the direct force of steam; Desaguliers introduced the safety-valve; Beighton and Smeaton improved the mechanism; Dalesme needs not to be mentioned, as we are not informed what plan he executed, but he

certainly made no step himself. If the direct force of steam, as well as atmospheric pressure, had been both employed, with the jet of cold water, the safety-valve, and the contrivance for regulating the supply valves, a far better engine than any ever known before the time of Watt would have been produced, and yet nothing whatever would have been added to the former inventions, they would only have been combined together. The result of the whole is, that one of the greatest theoretical steps was made by Papin, who was, during a long period, little commemorated; and that Savery and Newcomen, who have been by many called the inventors, were the first of all the ingenious and useful persons whose successive improvements we have now recorded, to apply the steam engine to practical purposes. France has thus produced the man who, next to Watt, may be regarded as the author of the steamengine; of all Watt's predecessors, Papin stands incontestably at the head; but it is almost certain that he never actually constructed an engine. Though the engine of Savery was of considerable use in pumping to a small height, and indeed has not entirely gone out of use in our own times; and though Newcomen's was still more extensively useful, from being applicable to mines, not only had no means ever been found of using the steam power for any other purpose than drawing up water, but even in that operation it was exceedingly imperfect and very expensive, insomuch that a water power was often preferred to it, and even a horse-power, in many cases, afforded equal advantages. The great consumption of fuel which it required was its cardinal defect; the other imperfection was its loss of all direct benefit from the expansive force of the steam itself. That element was only used in creating a vacuum, and an air-pump might have done as much, had it been worked by water or by horses. It was, in the strictest sense of the word, an air and not a steam-engine."* When the progress of invention had proceeded thus far, the genius of Watt, guided by sound judgment, and urged by unremitting application, effected in less than forty years a complete change in the power of mechanism;" and hence we now devote our efforts to a brief abstract of the life and doings of the utilizer of steam-James Watt.

In a small, comfortable cottage at the east end of the south side of Dalrymple Street, in the old burgh town and seaport of Greenock -of the Council of which he was treasurer-dwelt Mr. James Watt, shipwright, builder, and general merchant, a clever pursuer of many handicraft arts, and a successful conductor of such commercial speculations as the state of trade at that time afforded opportunity for. His wife was Agnes Muirhead, a handsome, well-informed, and good-tempered woman, in whose veins ran the "bluid" of the "lairds of Lachop." To this honest pair there were born five children, of whom three, two sons and a daughter, died in infancy,

Lord Brougham's works, vol. I., Lives of the Philosophers of the Time of George III., article, Watt, p. 30.

and the latest born, John, was lost at sea in the twenty-fourth year of his age-only seven years after the death of his mother, in 1755. Their fourth child was the James Watt to whom

"Nature disclosed the artful plan

To mould the mist into Leviathan."

He was born 19th Jan., 1736. He was sickly in childhood, and was an object of much anxiety, for the parents, tried by former losses, almost despaired of training him through the perils of boyhood, or of his ever attaining to man's estate. The delicate boy, though kept long from school, was of an observative and thoughtful turn of mind, and found in the shop and workshops of his father, as well as in the splendid scenery of land-locked sea and towering mountain near him, multitudes of "object lessons," which excited his intelligence, quickened his aptitudes, and, by gratifying his curiosity, increased his thirst for information. He made teachers of all he saw, and often made himself master of their secrets. His mother taught him to read, his father imparted to him the rudiments of writing and arithmetic. He was carefully drilled in his lessons, though not harassed with them, and though far outstripped in schoollearning by many of the burly youngsters who jibed the feeble home-pet, he had an education of the feelings and senses seldom acquired in those old days of stern catechetical discipline and classical drudgery. Marvellous stories are often told of "the boyhood of great men," as if, in their early years, their future eminence had been foreshadowed. In the biography of James Watt these are not wanting; nor do we think that they are, in this case, apocryphal. It would be impossible for us, however, in a mere sketch, such as this must be, to criticize minutely the tales of his selfsuggested discovery of geometrical truths, of his early acquaintance with algebraic formula, of his precocious powers of calculation, and of inventing and constructing philosophical toys. It must suffice us to say that such stories seem to be authentically narrated, and appear to be credible, for the boyhood of Watt was different in its conditions from that of the majority of children in his day.

After the anxious expenditure of a mother's care, and the faithful patience of a father's affection, the boy's health seemed to warrant his attendance at a public school, there to be braced by competition, and fired by contact with his age-fellows. In the commercial school of Mr. McAdam he increased his knowledge of penmanship and accounts, under the learned and excellent Robert Arrol, Master of the Burgh Grammar School of Greenock; he acquired a fair acquaintance with Latin, and a "little Greek;" while with a relative of his own, John Marr, he studied mathematics with zeal and purpose, with a loving diligence which won his master's and his parents' admiration. Though not a frequent companion in the giddy joys of schoolboy life, he was a great favourite with his comrades, on account of his mechanical ingenuity, and his rare power of storytelling, a power which he exercised with an imaginative fertility

and a fascination of style more delightful to his hearers than the daily-drilled narrative of the Æneid, the Homeric "Tale of Troy divine," the verses of

"Him who left half-told The story of Cambuscan bold,"

or the "linked sweetness long drawn out" of the "Faëry Queene." Scotland has always been famed for legend and tradition; and in Watt's youth, when the Jacobite rebellion was an actuality,when "bonnie Prince Charlie" really fought at Falkirk, feasted in Holyrood, failed at Culloden, and fled thence a fugitive to Francethere can be little doubt that mother-told tales of the stern and sturdy wars of the olden times were frequent at a fireside graced by a female descendant of the ballad-famed Muirheads; or that Watt, having been thrilled himself by the magic of story, had learned to use its witcheries on others.

The home-training, to which Watt was subjected, was judicious though indulgent. Manliness and morality were carefully inculcated, and strictly, but with enlightened affection, enforced. The boy grew up sincere, truthful, honest, persevering, intelligent, and thoughtful. His uncle, John Muirhead, often united with the elder Watt in commercial transactions, and the greatest cordiality prevailed between the brothers-in-law, and James Watt had the privi lege of frequent intercourse with his uncle's family, both in Glasgow and at Killearn, on the banks of Loch Lomond. In Glasgow, too, he had another influential relative, viz., George Muirhead, Professor of Humanity in the University there, and one of the editors of the magnificent Foulis" "Homer" (1756-8). In his fourteenth year, a copy of Gravesande's "Elements of Physics" came into Watt's hands, and fired his mind with its destined ambition. He became an experimenter in chemistry, mechanics, electricity, &c., and so cultured in himself the capacities of researchful observation. This phenomenon-watching inquisitiveness did not meet his aunt, Mrs. Muirhead's, notions of utilitarianism, and she scolded him after this fashion:-"James Watt, I never saw such an idle boy. Take a book, and employ yourself usefully. For the last hour you have not spoken one word, but taken off the lid of that kettle and put it on again; holding now a cup, and now a silver spoon over the steam, watching how it rises from the spout, and catching and connecting the drops of hot water it falls into. Are you not ashamed of spending your time in this way ?" Ah, good old dame! the boy has been indulging in a glorious dream-if he was then forecasting "the might that slumbers in elastic vapour,"-a dream that shall largely influence his own life, and emancipate man from manifold drudgeries, by placing that quirky spirit in slave-bonds, and harnessing him down to mechanical toil. The boy-thought is a new

* Published in 1740, and printed in English, edited by Dr. Desaguliers, in 1747 -five years after the author's death.

heaven-seed implanted in humanity to release vital force from everyday taskwork, and to produce a substitute for much of the most exhausting bodily labour in the manufactory and the mine, on the roadway, and across the sea; to supply unskilled labour by art, that so skilled labour may henceforth be the lot of thinking man. The boy's idle hour has potencies of usefulness in it incomputable by the meagre arithmetic of every-day existence; for there is in itas there is at the same time in the mind of a Glasgow Professor of morals—a revision of all old notions on "The Wealth of Nations.'

The facilities afforded by his father's business for acquiring a knowledge of the construction and uses of telescopes, quadrants, and other instruments of a similar sort, quickened in Watt's mind the love of geometrical, astronomical, and optical studies, and at last inclined him to choose, as his own pursuit in life, the manufacture of philosophical instruments. The need for a decision on that subject was not forced upon him early. He was in the seventeenth year of his age when some business reverses of his father's made it advisable to provide himself with some means of gaining a subsistence. He was apprenticed to a mathematical instrument maker in Glasgow; but his own ill health, the death of his mother, and his desire to get a proper training in his business, unitedly led him to break his indenture, and to set out for London, whither he went, under the care of his former teacher and cousin-german, John Marr. After a few difficulties, and a little hopelessness, James Watt, on agreeing to pay a premium of £21, and give his labour during the period of servitude, became the pupil, but not the apprentice, of John Morgan, mathematical instrument maker, in Finch Lane, Cornhill, for one year. His father's poverty made him determine on eating only the bread of industry. He worked early and late, with constancy and goodwill, and strove to make himself as little as possible burdensome at home. He jobbed at overhours, and improved both his finances and his skill by the efforts he made, though he injured his health, and gave additional poignancy to the headaches to which he had been subject from boyhood, besides adding to them rheumatic and nervous pains. In the autumn of 1756 he returned to his native land; and having supplied himself with a kit of superior tools, and a copy of the recently-deceased (1753) Nicholas Biron's treatise on "The Construction and Use of Mathematical Instruments,"-translated by a self-taught Scottish mathematician, Edward Stone-sought an outlet for his energies. Fortune, in this, favoured him. A merchant of Jamaica, Alexander Macfarlane, having died in 1755, bequeathed his collection of mathematical instruments to the Glasgow University; and on the suggestion of Dr. Moor, Professor of Greek, and Dr. Dick, Professor of Natural Philosophy, Watt was requested to unpack, arrange, clean, and repair them.

He thereafter attempted to establish himself in business in the city of Glasgow, but was opposed in this scheme by the members of the incorporated trades, who, because he was neither a burgess, a