red cheap and accessible, all
over the world, the materials of wealth and prosperity. It has
armed the feeble hand of man, in short, with a power to which no
limits can be assigned; completed the dominion of mind over the
most refractory qualities of matter; and laid a sure foundation
for all those future miracles of mechanical power which are to
aid and reward the labors of after generations. It is to the
genius of one man, too, that all this is mainly owing; and
certainly no man ever bestowed such a gift on his kind. The
blessing is not only universal, but unbounded; and the fabled
inventors of the plough and the loom, who were deified by the
erring gratitude of their rude contemporaries, conferred less
important benefits on mankind than the inventor of our present
steam engine.

This will be the fame of Watt with future generations; and it is
sufficient for his race and his country. But to those to whom he
more immediately belonged, who lived in his society and enjoyed
his conversation, it is not, perhaps, the character in which he
will be most frequently recalled--most deeply lamented--or even
most highly admired.

We shall end by quoting the greatest living authority, Lord Kelvin, now
Lord Chancellor of Glasgow University, which Watt and he have done so
much to render famous:

Precisely that single-acting, high-pressure, syringe-engine,
made and experimented on by James Watt one hundred and forty
years ago in his Glasgow College workshop, now in 1901, with the
addition of a surface-condenser cooled by air to receive the
waste steam, and a pump to return the water thence to the
boiler, constitutes the common-road motor, which, in the opinion
of many good judges, is the most successful of all the different
motors which have been made and tried within the last few years.
Without a condenser, Watt's high-pressure, single-acting engine
of 1761, only needs the cylinder-cover with piston-rod passing
steam-tight through it (as introduced by Watt himself in
subsequent developments), and the valves proper for admitting
steam on both sides of the piston and for working expansively,
to make it the very engine, which, during the whole of the past
century, has done practically all the steam work of the world,
and is doing it still, except on the sea or lakes or rivers,
where there i