of classical
literature; the most abstruse branches of science, and the
niceties of verbal criticism.

There was one quality in Mr. Watt which most honorably
distinguished him from too many inventors, and was worthy of all
imitation; he was not only entirely free from jealousy, but he
exercised a careful and scrupulous self-denial, and was anxious
not to appear, even by accident, as appropriating to himself
that which he thought belonged in part to others. I have heard
him refuse the honor universally ascribed to him, of being
inventor of the steam-engine, and call himself simply its
improver; though, in my mind, to doubt his right to that honor
would be as inaccurate as to question Sir Isaac Newton's claim
to his greatest discoveries, because Descartes in mathematics,
and Galileo in astronomy and mechanics, had preceded him; or to
deny the merits of his illustrious successor, because galvanism
was not his discovery, though before his time it had remained as
useless to science as the instrument called a steam-engine was
to the arts before Mr. Watt. The only jealousy I have known him
betray was with respect to others, in the nice adjustment he was
fond of giving to the claims of inventors. Justly prizing
scientific discovery above all other possessions, he deemed the
title to it so sacred, that you might hear him arguing by the
hour to settle disputed rights; and if you ever perceived his
temper ruffled, it was when one man's invention was claimed by,
or given to, another; or when a clumsy adulation pressed upon
himself that which he knew to be not his own.

Sir Humphrey Davy says:

I consider it as a duty incumbent on me to endeavor to set forth
his peculiar and exalted merits, which live in the recollection
of his contemporaries and will transmit his name with immortal
glory to posterity. Those who consider James Watt only as a
great practical mechanic form a very erroneous idea of his
character; he was equally distinguished as a natural philosopher
and a chemist, and his inventions demonstrate his profound
knowledge of those sciences, and that peculiar characteristic of
genius, the union of them for practical application. The steam
engine before his time was a rude machine, the result of simple
experiments on the compression of the atmosphere, and the
condensation