was

regularly trained tradesman, nor married to the daughter of any one possessed of the freedom of the city, forbade his opening a workshop or warehouse within the burgh bounds. The University came to his help, and gave him the use of a small room within the college precincts, next the apartments occupied by the Messrs. Foulis, printers to the University. Watt was appointed mathematical instrument maker to the University; and here, by a variety of miscellaneous exertions of acquired neat-handedness and inborn intelligence, he managed to make a moderate income. Fiddle-making, ornamental nick-nackeries, organ-building- though he entirely destitute of "musical ear"-employed the spare time of the modest and studious young man, who made and repaired the mechanical contrivances by which grave professors exemplified to sage students the modes of operation in which nature delighted. The city was full of James Watt's reputation as a handicraft, workman, and an intelligent artisan. The professors of the University-all men of note in their departments-encouraged the young mechanician, and the students loved and respected him. Small, steady gains gave him the hope of a living, and by entering into partnership with John Craig, who advanced a small capital in lieu of skill, he increased his chance of making "ends meet.' This commercial companionship lasted from 1759 till 1765, in which year John Craig died. In 1763, James Watt considered himself capable of starting housekeeping on his own account, and succeeded in July of that year in persuading his cousin, Miss Miller, whose father was the chief magistrate of Calton, to share his small home and his large hopes. This event probably gave emphasis to his desire to do something" more likely to win bread, enjoyment, and fame, than the trade of the artisan afforded opportunity for.

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He had the art of waiting without idling, and his interesting activity of thought made him an acquisition to college society. Adam Smith, the political economist; Simson, the geometer; Black, the discoverer of latent heat; Moor, the Grecian; Muirhead, the humanist and orientalist: John Miller, the historian and jurist; Clow, the [P] logician; Principal Leechman; Anderson, the physicist; Robert and Andrew Foulis, the printers, &c., then formed the chief members of the literary society of the city, and they found in Watt a man of congenial intellectuality and taste. These men gave his mind employment and aim, they encouraged his inventive genius, and spurred on his ambition. The old dreams of greatness which as a lad had glorified his life, though gaining him the chastisement of his aunt's disapprobation, began to play about his brain, and his little shop-now in the Saltmarket-was the scene of many experiments for increasing the home-income.

Just as his mind was all alert for some new stroke of moneymaking ingenuity, the chance came. During the session of 1763-4, John Anderson, who had between 1756-60 occupied the chair of oriental languages, then vacated by Watt's relative, George Muirhead, but who was now professor of natural philosophy, required to

illustrate his prelections on elastic vapours by experiments with a model of Newcomen's engine. The instrument belonging to the University broke down, and it was sent to Watt for repair. His mind had been reverting of late pretty frequently to the subject of steam. He had held several conversations about it with John Robison, then a student, afterwards professor of chemistry in the University of Glasgow, and, at a later period, occupant of the chair of natural philosophy at Edinburgh. This opportune and suggestive reminder, aided as it was by the recent study of Dr. John T. Desagulier's "Experimental Philosophy" (1734), the translation of Gravesande, already mentioned, and B. F. de Belidor's "Science of Engineering" (1729), and Hydraulic Architecture (1739-1753), was through pressure of business almost becoming effectless. He began to repair it "as a mere mechanician," he says, when he noticed that though apparently all right, "its boiler could not supply it with steam" enough to keep it working more than a few strokes at a time. This anomaly between means and purpose, however, astonished his persistent curiosity, and he who had studied the science of Harmonies that he might construct an organ, and in his impatience to be a thorough master of mechanics learned the then rarely acquired languages of Germany and Italy, was not likely to spare pains or labour to discover the reason of this faultiness in the simplest and most powerful engine that had hitherto been constructed. The determination to find a reply to this imperatively recurring-why?-formed at once the crisis of Watt's life, and the first step towards the emancipation of industry. "Everything," says Professor Robison, "became to him a subject of new and serious study-everything became science in his hands." In a mind so prone to reasoning, and so sedulously ambitious of success, it is not to be wondered at that "this little job of the model came opportunely in his way, and immediately took up his whole attention." And we can easily fancy

"How he would sit alone

When the hard labour of the day was done,
Bent o'er his table, silent as a stone,

To make the wisdom of the wise his own,"

that he might apply it to the accomplishment of the design with which his mind was busy. It would be useless and unprofitable here, and now-even were the present writer capable of doing soto enumerate the many beautiful though abortive specimens of ingenuity which, with a rare facility and fertility of resource, he produced during the period of anxious experimentation which preceded the realization of his ideal. He tested the theory of heat, investigated anew the properties of steam and other elastic vapours, he employed himself in chemical researches, in inquiries regarding atmospheric air and its powers, and in the careful manipulation of glass, metals, &c., so far as they seemed likely to be contributory to the end he had in view. Then he read voraciously, avariciously,

and gloated over each newly-gained fact like an alchemist over his crucible. Nor was this insatiable persistency, energy, and thought useless or unrewarded. This competent knowledge supplied him with the power to overcome Nature; for "Nature,' as he used to say, "has a weak side, if we can only find it out." His hour of triumph came, and to

"His sagacious mind,

With faculty inventive rarely fraught,"

she communicated the inspiration which enabled him to knit together the engine's bones of steel and sinews of brass, to set in its heart a burning furnace, and to give it the hot breath of a new life, while he reserved to man the power of being the guiding soul of all its motions. "One Sunday afternoon," he says, "I had gone out to take a walk in the Green of Glasgow" (a large park on the north bank of the Clyde, in the south-east part of the city, consisting of 136 acres of grass and walks, open to the public), and when about halfway between Arns well and the herd's house, my thoughts having been naturally turned to the experiments I had been engaged in for saving heat in the cylinder, at that part of the road the idea occurred to me, that, as steam was an elastic vapour, it would expand, and rush into a previously exhausted space; and that, if I were to produce a vacuum in a separate vessel, and open a communication between the steam in the cylinder and the exhausted vessel, such would be the consequence." This idea was alone wanting to the entire success of what Dr. Neil Arnott calls "the king of machines." The date of this flash of thought-this mysterious apparition of the solution of the one great difficulty which lay between the unition of idea and reality—this strange outstart from the spontaneity of the intellect or sudden impingement upon the conceptive mind, is stated to have been "the summer of 1765."

Scarcely a century, therefore, has yet elapsed since the conception-day of that mighty engine which has revolutionized human industry, and has compacted into "the days of the years" of each man's life the results and changes of steam's exhaustless energies, the advantages of the labours of those Anakims and Cyclopes who have been made our fags and drudges, slaves and bondsmen. These huge leviathans of industry, which plod and toil, and tug and strain their great, tireless limbs in our service, in all the multiform processes of effortful labour, are the lineal progeny of that thoughtborn mechanism which "in the twinkling of an eye" converted the almost useless inventions, studies, and discoveries of many lives into available agencies for economical and expeditious manufacture, travelling, printing, &c., and added in a moment incalculable wealth to the world at large. Truly

"The value of a thought cannot be told "!

And there probably has never been one instant, in the long reach of past ages, when so much latent life was quickened into utility and

wealth as that in which this single out-jet of thought imparted the soul of motion to the mechanism of which James Watt was the inventor, and gave the gigantic skeleton that elastic life which thrills its pulseless but all-pliant limbs. Oh, the high-bounding feel of intellectual energy, the glow, the quiver and enchantment which the great spirit and busy heart of the "philosophical instrument maker to the University of Glasgow" must have experienced, when that full-freighted idea rushed from its lurking corner in the mind, and lit up the inanimate masses of the mine with life, and harnessed the matter of the clouds to an everlasting servitude!

He did

The single central thought being now gained, it became the aim and purpose of Watt's life to work into a practical form the intellectual Frankenstein he had created, and to subdue to his idea the almost incorrigible and very refractory elements to be employed in the construction of the engine, in order that it might become applicable to the uses of daily life, and available in the ordinary operations and processes of the industries of the masses. not, all at once, succeed in wedding and welding the agencies of mechanism, and in amalgamating the ideal and the real. It was a long labour to inspirit the iron thews and the vaporous wanderers through immensity with his purpose, and incline them to work together in friendly simultaneity, that they might transform, raise, and ennoble the whole material existence of humanity, by accepting the drudgery of industry as their portion in the great manifoldness of exertion necessary to supply all human wants. Not all at once, or wholly by him, were the whims of the winds and the passionate rebelliousness of the sea, the freedom of the vapours, and the inert self-will of iron overcome; nor, though due to his early thought, was the whole sum of change which civilization in one century has undergone, the work of his intellect. But he accomplished the subjugation of that one physical power from which commerce and industry 'draw their noblest forces; and to his persistent determination to succeed, science owes many of its marvels, art many of its grandest achievements, trade a multitude of improved processes, and commerce the means of nearly annihilating distance, and of almost overcoming time. So replete has that thought been with change, benefit, and transformation.

Around the simplest steam-engine there ever circles a whole multitude of powers self-willed and dangerous, but which have all been overcome and harmonized by the constructive ingenuity of the maker. The laws of atmospheric pressure, of friction, of motion, of metallic production and power, of velocities and forces, of expansion and condensation, of economization of fuel, space, labour, and superintendence, of adaptative construction, of means, ends, causes, and effects, require to be provided for or against, and the mechanism brought into harmony with them all, as well as with the specific industrial purposes which led to its being conceived and made.

The necessary inadequacy of any exposition of the nature and

uses of Watt's engine, which can be given by any one except an adept who has long and manifoldly occupied himself in the study of the operations of that multiform mechanism, might readily restrain us from any attempt at a formal description of it. When, however, we remember that the distinct achievement of Watt was to bring the elastic force of the vapour of heated water directly and immediately into exercise as a source of power, we perceive that our present business is not to describe that exceedingly complex mystery of mechanism which now starts into thought at the mention of the steam-engine. That hard-working, sweatless monster, whose vibrating beams play at the pit-head, whose cranks turn the wheels of ships or locomotives, or set in motion the complicated mechanical contrivances of manufactories, or whose resounding pistons clank in the great foundries of our day-wherein human wit has so armed the iron with wise power, that it seizes upon great masses of its smelted ore, squeezes it into plates, cuts it into ribands, or moulds it into almost any predetermined shapethat giant of the forge, the factory, the mine, the rail, and the ocean, that weariless coadjutor of humanity is a highly trained and cultured Caliban compared with the engine to which Watt's early thought gave life. It had little of that recondite multiplicity of parts, processes, requirements, and capacities which the steamengine of our time displays. Reduced to the one distinguishing idea, it seems to us that it may be intelligibly represented in our minds as a strongly compacted cylinder, in which a closely fitted piston works by the alternate admission of steam above and below it, the said steam being supplied in any convenient way from a suitable boiler, and the said piston being attached in any convenient way to the machinery which it is desirable should be set in motion. The contrivances requisite to subdue and direct the vaporous energy, and the means by which it is adapted to impart its aid to man, are things apart from the ideal plan for bringing the gigantic force of steam to act as a direct source of power, and as a manageable appliance wheresoever that power was required in any of the departments of industrial life, or in any of the arts or processes of civilization. In order, however, to make this paper complete in itself, and to give its due prominence to the mechanical side of the subject, we subjoin from an authoritative work the following abstract of the changes, and the modes of effecting them, which James Watt made in the passage from an atmospheric to that of a steam engine.

"The first and most important improvement of Watt's on the engine consisted in effecting the condensation in a separate vessel, termed the condenser, which communicated with the cylinder. This condenser being filled with steam from the boiler at the same time with the cylinder, the jet of cold water, admitted into the former only, effected the condensation of the whole volume of steam, both of that in the cylinder as well as that in the condenser, in conformity with the well-known principle in physics, that an action originated in any part of a homogeneous fluid is almost instantaneously communicated throughout the mass.