Renkin-Zabaglia-Ferracino.

233 and triumphing over them, as could be scarcely exceeded by any his successors might have to encounter. By the boldness and success with which, in particular, he carried the Grand Trunk Navigation across the elevated ground of the midland counties, he demonstrated that there was hardly any part of the island where a canal might not be formed; and, accordingly, this very central ridge, which used to be deemed so insurmountable an obstacle to the junction of our opposite coasts, is now intersected by more than twenty canals, beside the one which he first drove through the barrier. It is in the conception and accomplishment of such grand and fortunate deviations from ordinary practice that we discern the power, and confess the value, of original genius.

The case of Brindley affords us a wonderful example of what the force of natural talent will sometimes do in attaining an acquaintance with particular departments of science, in the face of almost every conceivable disadvantage-where not only all education is wanting, but even all access to books. Nor is he the only celebrated practical mechanician that might be named, whose inventive faculties have been successfully exercised without any help from literature. The French engineer, SWALM RENKIN, or RANNEQUIN, as he is more commonly called, who, in the reign of Louis XIV., constructed the famous machine of Marli for raising the water of the Seine to the gardens of Versailles, was originally only a common carpenter at Liege, where he was born about the middle of the seventeenth century, and had no means of acquiring knowledge except in the workshop and by his own reflection. A learned contemporary writer, Professor Weidler, of Wittemberg, describes him by the Greek epithet avaλpaßηros—ignorant even of the alphabet. Yet the apparatus which he erected at Versailles, and which was of extraordinary complexity, was regarded in that age as the greatest mechanical wonder in the world. It raised water from the Seine to the height of four hundred and seventy-six feet above the level of the river. The Italian engineer, NICHOLAS ZABAGLIA, who was born at Rome in 1674, was also originally a poor working carpenter, and altogether uneducated. In this capacity he was first employed at the Vatican; and yet he was eventually appointed to preside over the building of St. Peter's, where he did not, however, confine himself to the duties of superintendence and direction, but continued to work with his own hands as before. Zabaglia was the author of many mechanical contrivances, distinguished for their simplicity and elegance. He was the contemporary of BARTHOLOMEW FERRACINO, another self-taught mechanician of great genius. Ferracino was bred sawyer, in which occupation he was employed while very young, and when the severe labour was almost too much for his strength. He at length, however, contrived a saw which moved by the wind, and did his work for him. After this, he invented many other ingenious machines, and acquired a distinguished reputation in various depart

ments of practical mechanics. The great clock in the Place of St. Mark, at Venice, was of his construction. But his chief work was the bridge over the Brenta, near his native town of Bassano; it has been much celebrated. Ferracino was quite ignorant of books; and, when his friends would sometimes advise him to give his great natural powers fair play by applying himself to the regular study of the principles of mechanical science, he used to say, with a laugh, which, however, may possibly have covered some misgiving and self-reproach, that nature had been a very good teacher to him, and that he had all the books he wanted in his head. Our own countryman, the celebrated JOHN HARRISON, who, in 1767, obtained the parliamentary reward of twenty thousand

pounds for the invention of his admirable chronometer, or time-piece, for ascertaining the longitude at sea, may be quoted as another remarkable example of genius, in the main self-taught. He was born at Pontefract, in Yorkshire, in 1623, and was bred a carpenter; yet he very early manifested a taste for mathematical science, which is said to have been first awakened by a manuscript copy of some lectures of Saunderson (the blind mathematician), that accidentally fell into his hands; and it should seem that he was not so entirely without education as to be unable to peruse and profit by them. Before he was twenty-one, he had made two wooden clocks by himself, and without having received any instructions in the art. We have, in a former chapter, mentioned the circumstance of his having been first induced to think of applying himself to the construction of marine chronometers by living for some time

in sight of the sea. It was in 1728 that he first came up to London,.in order to prosecute this object; but he had to devote to it the anxious labours of nearly forty years before his inventions were perfected, or their general merit fully recognised. The art of watchmaking owes several valuable improvements to Harrison; among which may be particularly mentioned the gridiron pendulum, and the expansion balancewheel-the one serving to equalize the movements of a clock, and the other those of a watch, under all changes of temperature-and both depending upon the unequal stretching under change of temperature of two different metals, which are so employed to form the rod of the pendulum and the circumference of the wheel, that the contraction of the one exactly counterbalances the expansion of the other. Although, however, a most skilful and ingenious artist, Harrison never acquired any command or correct knowledge of his native language; and a little work which he published in his old age, in explanation of some of his ideas on the construction of time-pieces, is miserably ill-written. He died in London, in 1776, at the age of eighty-three.

Of these, and all such instances, it may safely be remarked that, far from proving the inutility of scientific acquirements, they only, while they show how far, in one particular line, natural genius can carry its possessors without cultivation, make us regret their having wanted those helps which, even in that line, would have carried them so much farther.

CHAPTER XX.

ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGES:-MAGLIABECCHI; HILL; WILD; ARAM; PURVER; PENDRELL.

IF mechanical invention does not necessarily imply much study of books, and may seem, on that account, a province of intellectual exertion fitted for persons who have not enjoyed the advantages of a regular education, as being one in which natural sagacity and ingenuity, as much as literary attainments, are requisite to insure advancement, the same thing can hardly be said of another department, in which self-taught genius has frequently made extraordinary progress; we mean the study of languages. This is the sort of knowledge, indeed, which, in common parlance, is more peculiarly called learning. Its acquisition, in the circumstances alluded to, can only be the result of a love for and familiarity with books, and of what we may call the literary habit thoroughly formed. Great linguists have, indeed, been generally devourers of books, not merely as being the grand storehouses of words—the fountains from

which they draw their supplies of that knowledge to which they are especially attached,—but as constituting also an ample domain of enjoyment of which the possession of this knowledge makes them free, far beyond other men.

There are three purposes for which languages may be studied, independently of their gratifying that general desire of information which makes both the acquirement and the possession of all knowledge delightful. Speech is the most perfect and beautiful of all the creations or products of the human mind, considered merely as an instrument adapted to a certain use; and in this point of view it forms a peculiarly interesting and valuable study for the metaphysician, both as, from the extreme delicacy of its structure, recording with inimitable fidelity many of the nicest and most fugitive processes of thought and feeling, and recording them, at the same time, more imperishably, and more commodiously for deliberate examination, than if the impression of them had been taken in iron or in marble. One use, therefore, and a highly important one, to be made of the knowledge of languages, is the study of that intellectual mechanism by which they have been formed, and of which they present us, as it were, with the impress or picture. Another department of philosophy to which this knowledge is a key, is that relating to the early history of our race, and the origin of the different nations by whom the earth is peopled—a subject to many parts of which we have no other guide than the evidence of language, but upon which this evidence, skilfully interpreted, may often be made to throw considerable light. But the motive which most generally induces the student to seek an acquaintance with foreign or ancient tongues is, of course, that he may be able to read the books written in them, and thus obtain access to worlds of intellectual treasure, from which he would be otherwise entirely, or almost entirely, shut out. For no thorough knowledge of any foreign literature is to be acquired through translations. Of many works translations do not exist, or are not accessible when the original is; and of many there can be no adequate translation. The man whose knowledge of the literature of another age or country is confined to translations, is in the situation of the untravelled reader, who may, indeed, learn something of foreign lands from the descriptions of those who have visited them; but a person familiar with the language of another people has that sort of access to their literature, which one would have to the general knowledge of their country and their manners, who should be in possession of the talisman of Eastern fiction, by which he could transport himself thither at a wish.

Perhaps the greatest reader that ever lived was the famous ANTONIO MAGLIABECCHI, of whose latinized name Antonius Magliabecchius, some one formed the anagram,-Is unus bibliotheca magna-Himself a great library. He was born at Florence in 1633, and, according to one ac

count, commenced his career as a scholar in a very curious manner; for having, it is affirmed, been apprenticed by his parents, who were extremely poor, to a seller of pot-herbs, he used to take the greatest delight, although he could not read a word, in poring over the leaves of old books in which his master wrapped his commodities; till, having been one day observed at this sort of study by a bookseller who lived in the neighbourhood, that person offered to take him into his service. The proposal was instantly accepted by Magliabecchi, who could conceive no greater happiness than an occupation which would surround him with his beloved books. So keen, it is added, was the interest which he took in his new employment, that in two or three days he knew the place of every volume in the shop, and could find any one, when asked for, more readily than his master himself. After a short time he had learned to read, and then every moment of his leisure was devoted to this new pleasure. Such is the story which Mr. Spence has told us, on the authority, as he states, of a Florentine gentleman well acquainted with Maglia becchi and his family. The Italian writer, Marmi, however, who, having been librarian to the Grand Duke of Florence, was, for many years, an intimate friend of Magliabecchi, has, in a life which he has written of him, given a different account of his early years. His mother, according to Marmi, had him instructed both in the art of design and in Latin when he was a boy, after which she apprenticed him to a goldsmith. Whether his master was a goldsmith or a bookseller, it is agreed on all hands that, during the time of his apprenticeship, Maglia becchi had already begun those extraordinary acquisitions which made him at length the most learned man of his age. The fame of his ardour for study, and extensive knowledge, at length procured him the notice of some of the Florentine literati; and, having been introduced at court, he was appointed by the Grand Duke keeper of one of his libraries. In this situation he remained till his death, in 1714, at the age of eighty-one.

Many wonderful stories are told of the extensive reading and retentive memory of Magliabecchi. It has been said, among other things, that a manuscript of a work of some length, which, at the request of the author, he had read, having been lost, was actually recovered by being taken down from his recitation. This, however, as Mr. Spence observes, is doubtless a very wild exaggeration; it amounts, evidently, if true, to nothing less than a proof that Magliabecchi's memory was such as to retain everything, without exception, to which his attention was ever called. But of what he read really worth recollecting, he undoubtedly recollected a great deal. He was, indeed, a library of reference upon all sorts of subjects for the other literary men of his time, who were wont to apply to him whenever they wanted to know what had been already written upon any matter which they were engaged in studying or