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muslin and forge anchors; cut steel into ribbands, and impel loaded vessels against the fury of the winds and waves." And another application of it, which has been made only within the last few months, is perhaps destined to be productive of still greater changes on the condition of society than have resulted from any of its previous achievements. It had been employed, several years ago, at some of our collieries, in the propelling of heavily loaded carriages over rail-ways; but the great experiment of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway has, for the first time, practically demonstrated with what hitherto almost undreamt-of rapidity travelling by land may hereafter be carried on through the aid of steam. Coaches, under the impetus communicated by this, the most potent, and at the same time the most perfectly controllable of all our mechanical agencies, have already been drawn forward at the flying speed of thirty and thirty-five miles an hour. If so much has been done already, it would be rash to conclude that even this is to be our ultimate limit of attainment. In navigation, the resistance of the water, which increases rapidly as the force opposed to it increases, very soon sets bounds to the rate at which even the power of steam can impel a vessel forward. But, on land, the thin medium of the air presents no such insurmountable obstacle to a force making its way through it; and a rapidity of movement may perhaps be eventually attained here, which is to us even as yet inconceivable. But even when the rate of land travelling already shewn to be quite practicable shall have become universal, in what a new state of society shall we find ourselves! When we

shall be able to travel a hundred miles in any direc tion in six or eight hours, into what comparative neighbourhood will the remotest extremes even of a large country be brought, and how little shall we

hink of what we now call distance! A nation will then be indeed a community; and all the benefits of the highest civilization, instead of being confined to one central spot, will be diffused equally over the land, like the light of heaven. This improvement, in short, when fully consummated, will confer upon man nearly as much new power and new enjoyment as if he were actually endowed with wings.

It is gratifying to reflect that even while he was yet alive, Watt received from the voice of the most illustrious of his contemporaries the honours due to his genius. In 1785 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; the degree of Doctor of Laws was conferred upon him by the University of Glasgow in 1806; and in 1808 he was elected a member of the French Institute. He died on the 25th of August, 1819, in the 84th year of his age.

We cannot better conclude our sketch of the life of this great inventor than by the following extract from the character that has been drawn of him by the eloquent writer (Mr. Jeffrey) whom we have already quoted. "Independently of his great attainments in mechanics, Mr. Watt was an extraordinary, and in many respects a wonderful man. Perhaps no individual in his age possessed so much and such varied and exact information,-had read so much, or remembered what he had read so accurately and well. He had infinite quickness of apprehension, a prodigious memory, and a certain rectifying and methodising power of understanding, which extracted something precious out of all that was presented to it. His stores of miscellaneous knowledge were immense, and yet less astonishing than the command he had at all times over them. It seemed as if every subject that was casually started in conversation had been that which he had been last occupied in studying and exhausting; such was

the copiousness, the precision, and the admirable clearness of the information which he poured out upon it without effort or hesitation. Nor was this promptitude and compass of knowledge confined in any degree to the studies connected with his ordinary pursuits. That he should have been minutely and extensively skilled in chemistry and the arts, and in most of the branches of physical science, might perhaps have been conjectured; but it could not have been inferred from his usual occupations, and probably is not generally known, that he was curiously learned in many branches of antiquity, metaphysics, medicine, and etymology, and perfectly at home in all the details of architecture, music, and law. He was well acquainted, too, with most of the modern languages, and familiar with their most recent literature. Nor was it at all extraordinary to hear the great mechanician and engineer detailing and expounding, for hours together, the metaphysical theories of the German logicians, or criticising the measures or the matter of the German poetry.

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His astonishing memory was aided, no doubt, in a great measure, by a still higher and rarer faculty-by his power of digesting and arranging in its proper place all the information he received, and of casting aside and rejecting, as it were instinctively, whatever was worthless of immaterial. Every conception that was suggested to his mind seemed instantly to take its place among its other rich furniture, and to be condensed into the smallest and most convenient form. He never appeared, therefore, to be at all encumbered or perplexed with the verbiage of the dull books he perused, or the idle talk to which he listened; but to have at once extracted, by a kind of intellectual alchemy, all that was worthy of attention, and to have reduced it for his own use to its true value and to its simplest form,

And thus it often happened, that a great deal more was learned from his brief and vigorous account of the theories and arguments of tedious writers, than an ordinary student could ever have derived from the most faithful study of the originals, and that errors and absurdities became manifest from the mere clearness and plainness of his statement of them, which might have deluded and perplexed most of his hearers without that invaluable assistance."*

*The portrait of Mr. Watt, in this volume, is from a drawing partly copied from a picture of Sir W. Beechey, and partly from Mr. Chantrey's bust. The drawing was executed under the obliging direction of Mr. Watt, of Aston Hall, and has also had the advantage of Mr. Chantrey's suggestions.

CHAPTER XIV.

Sir Richard Arkwright.-The Cotton Manufacture.

We propose now to give some account of an individual, whose rise from a very humble origin to affluence and distinction was the result of his persevering attention to the improvement of the machinery employed in one of the most important branches of our manufactures, and whose name is intimately connected with the recent history of the commercial greatness of this country. We allude to the celebrated Sir RICHARD ARKWRIGHT. Arkwright was born on the 23d of December, 1732, at Preston, in Lancashire. His parents were very poor, and he was the youngest of a family of thirteen children; so that we may suppose the school education he received, if he ever was at school at all, was extremely limited. Indeed, but little learning would probably be deemed necessary for the profession to which he was bred,that of a barber. This business he continued to follow till he was nearly thirty years of age; and this first period of his history is of course obscure enough. About the year 1760, however, or soon after, he gave up shaving, and commenced business as an itinerant dealer in hair, collecting the commodity by travelling up and down the country, and then, after he had dressed it, selling it again to the wig-makers, with whom he very soon acquired the character of keeping a better article than any of his rivals in the same trade. He had obtained possession, too, we are told, of a secret method of dyeing the hair, by

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