"The fables of Old Giants realised, Behold, in this unsleeping sinewy slave! He toils in Earth's deep mines, o'er Ocean's wave, Whether through barren heath and mountain gorge Or call'd to wield his hammer at the forge, To work the will of his weak master, Man. "After years of intellectual toil and mental anxiety, James Watt brought the steam-engine to such perfection as to make it the most precious gift that man ever bequeathed to his race."-Sir D. Brewster. "Watt, the man whose genius discovered the means of multiplying our national resources to a degree, perhaps, even beyond his own stupendous powers of calculation and combination, bringing the treasures of the abyss to the summit of the earth; giving the feeble arm of man the momentum of an Afrite; commanding manufactures to arise, as the rod of the prophet produced waters in the desert; affording the means of dispensing with that time and tide which wait for no man, and of sailing without that wind which defied the commands and threats of Xerxes."-Sir Walter Scott. THE UTILISATION OF STEAM. TEAM was, for long ages, one of the waste products of nature. It is scarcely a century since the means of utilising it were discovered and invented; and it was yoked in servitude to that mighty and manifold series of mechanical agencies which augments the energies, increases the comforts, and promotes the improvement of the human race. The numerous applications of steam to the useful purposes of life; the various modes in which it can exert a ministry of beneficence; and the many differing methods in which it enlarges the sphere of human influence, and fits itself in, so directly, to the several purposes of an advanced civilisation, could scarcely have been dreamed of by those who watched the rising vapours of the morn on the banks of the green old Nile, on Corinth's shores, or beside the empire-margined Tiber; and, indeed, that it ever could become the subservient serf of man, and execute not only his bidding, but his work, does not, on an à priori view of the case, seem very probable even to ourselves. Yet the substance of that same retinue of clouds which girds the sun "With pomp, with glory, and magnificence," or forms that "pestilent congregation of vapours" which casts its gloom over city and town, as well as hamlet, is, in S ગ great part, a similar aëriform mass to that whose force bridges the ocean-spaces between continents; speeds the engine with current swiftness over the iron-lines which link factory-centre to metropolitan populousness, and swinks with almost exhaustless efficacy, as the generator of motions, forces, and means by which the capacity of man has been multiplied to an indefinable extent. The progress of that marvellous thought by which the industrial power of humanity is so wondrously augmented, from the earliest observation of some reflective man upon the elasticity of vapour, to the moment in which steam was utilised by the genius of Watt, would, if rightly told, form the strangest of "the fairy tales of science," and would be a historic truth far surpassing the sublimest reach of fiction. Man's progress in the utilisation of steam seems to have been very slow. Hero of Alexandria (cir. 120 B.C.,) in a work "On Pneumatics," describes two machines of his own invention, in which a rotary motion was conveyed in the one case by the emission of heated air, and in the other by the immission and emission of steam. The latter is the first known attempt to effect the production of motion by the employment of elastic vapour. It was, however, used only as a toy, and does not seem to have been applied to any utilitarian purpose. This plaything is the original of that distinguished "species" of mechanism now known as the steam-engine. It was for ages a curiosity of mechanics. Nor till the stir and ferment of the Reformation does it appear to have entered into the human mind that the spirals of vapour rising from heated water could become weariless labourers for humanity; and then it was more an outburst of rhetoric than a scientific appraisement of facts. A volume of sermons by Mathesius, published at Sarepta in |