wer to do much more
than this, however, lies theoretically in gas, but there come these wise
words of Arago to mind: "Persons whose whole lives have been devoted to
speculative labours are not aware how great the distance is between a
scheme, apparently the best concerted, and its realisation." So true!
Watt's ideas in the brain, and the steam engine that he had to evolve
during nine long years, are somewhat akin to the great gulf between
resolve and performance, the "good resolution" that soothes and the
"act" that exalts.

The steam engine is Scotland's chief, tho not her only contribution to
the material progress of the world. Watt was its inventor, we might
almost write Creator, so multiform were the successive steps. Symington
by the steamship stretched one arm of it over the water; Stephenson by
the locomotive stretched the other over the land. Thus was the world
brought under its sway and conditions of human life transformed. Watt
and Symington were born in Scotland within a few miles of each other.
Stephenson's forbears moved from Scotland south of the line previous to
his birth, as Fulton's parents removed from Scotland to America, so that
both Stephenson and Fulton could boast with Gladstone that the blood in
their veins was Scotch.

The history of the world has no parallel to the change effected by the
inventions of these three men. Strange that little Scotland, with only
1,500,000 people, in 1791, about one-half the population of New York
City, should have been the mother of such a triad, and that her second
"mighty three" (Wallace, Bruce and Burns always first), should have been
of the same generation, working upon the earth near each other at the
same time. The Watt engine appeared in 1782; the steamship in 1801; the
locomotive thirteen years later, in 1814. Thus thirty-two years after
its appearance Watt's steam-engine had conquered both sea and land.

The sociologist may theorise, but plain people will remember that men do
not gather grapes from thorns, nor figs from thistles. There must be
something in the soil which produces such men; something in the poverty
that compels exertion; something in the "land of the mountain and the
flood" that stirs the imagination; something in the history of centuries
of struggle for national and spiritual independence; much in the
system of compulsory and universal free education; something of all
these elements mingling in the blood that tells, and enables Scotland t