ical inventions have come
from those who have been cunning of hand and have worked as manual
laborers, generally in charge of the machinery or devices which they
have improved. When new processes have been invented, these also have
usually suggested themselves to the able workmen as they experienced the
crudeness of existing methods. Indeed, few important inventions have
come from those who have not been thus employed. It is with inventors as
with poets; few have been born to the purple or with silver spoons in
their mouths, and we shall plainly see later on that had it not been for
Watt's inherited and acquired manual dexterity, it is probable that the
steam engine could never have been perfected, so often did failure of
experiments arise solely because it was in that day impossible to find
men capable of executing the plans of the inventor. His problem was to
teach them by example how to obtain the exact work required when the
tools of precision of our day were unknown and the men themselves were
only workmen of the crudest kind. Many of the most delicate parts, even
of working engines, passed through Watt's own hands, and for most of his
experimental devices he had himself to make the models. Never was there
an inventor who had such reason to thank fortune that in his youth he
had learned to work with his hands. It proved literally true, as his
fellow-workmen in the shop predicted, that "Jamie's fortune was at his
finger-ends."

As before stated, he proved a backward scholar for a time, at the
grammar school. No one seems to have divined the latent powers
smoldering within. Latin and Greek classics moved him not, for his mind
was stored with more entrancing classics learned at his mother's knee:
his heroes were of nobler mould than the Greek demigods, and the story
of his own romantic land more fruitful than that of any other of the
past. Busy working man has not time to draw his inspiration from more
than one national literature. Nor has any man yet drawn fully from any
but that of his native tongue. We can no more draw our mental sustenance
from two languages than we can think in two. Man can have but one deep
source from whence come healing waters, as he can have but one mother
tongue. So it was with Watt. He had Scotland and that sufficed. When the
boy absorbs, or rather is absorbed by, Wallace, The Bruce, and Sir John
Grahame, is fired by the story of the Martyrs, has at heart page after
page of the country's ba