words of the immortal author of the Principia, we may lay open to the eyes of all the true secret of men of genius.

The spirit of anecdote, which, for more than half a century, our fellow-member so gracefully displayed among all by whom he was surrounded, manifested itself very early. You will find a proof of this in these few lines, which I have extracted from an unpublished memorandum committed to writing, in 1798, by Mrs. Marion Campbell, the cousin and early companion of the celebrated engineer.*

"His mother brought him to Glasgow to visit a friend, under whose caré he was left. On Mrs. Watt's return to Glasgow, some weeks after, without any idea of the reception which awaited her, her friend said, you must take your son James home, I can no longer bear the state of excitement in which he keeps me; I am worn out with want of sleep. Every evening, before our usual hour of retiring to rest, he adroitly contrives to engage me in conversation, then begins some striking tale, and, whether it be humorous or pathetic, the interest is so overpowering, that all the family listen to him with breathless attention; hour after hour strikes unheeded, but the next

* For this curious document I am indebted to my friend Mr. James Watt of Soho. Thanks to the profound veneration he has always entertained for the memory of his illustrious father; thanks to the unwearied goodness with which he has answered all my demands, I have been enabled to correct a variety of inaccuracies such as have found their way into the most esteemed biographies, and which I myself, misled by oral communications, received with too little caution, was at first unable to avoid.-M. Arago.

morning I feel quite exhausted. You must, really, take home your son.'"

James Watt had a younger brother, John, who, in resolving to pursue his father's business, left to his elder brother, as is usual in Scotland, liberty to follow his call. But that call it was difficult to discover, for the young student occupied himself with every thing, with equal success.

The banks of Loch Lomond, already rendered so famous by the recollections of Buchanan the historian, and of the illustrious inventor of logarithms, developed his taste for the beauties of scenery and for botany. His rambles over various mountains of Scotland, taught him to perceive that the inert crust of the earth no less deserves our attention, and he became a mineralogist. He entered the cottages of the poor to study their characters, and listen for hours to their local traditions, popular ballads, and wild superstitions. When bad health confined him under the paternal roof, chemistry was the principal subject of his experiments. 'S Gravesande's "Elements of Natural Philosophy" also initiated him into the infinite marvels of general physics; and to conclude, like all invalids, he greedily perused all books on

* John perished, in 1762, in one of his father's ships, on the passage from Greenock to America, at the age of twenty-three.-M. ARAGO.

+"Physices Elementa Mathematica experimentis confirmata, sive Introductio ad Philosophiam Newtonianam. Auctore Gulielmo Jacobo 's Gravesande, A.L.M. Jur. Utr. et Phil. Doctore, Regiae Societ. Lond. Socio; Astron. et Math. in Acad. Lugd. Bat. Professore ordinario. Lugduni Batavorum, M.DCC.xx. 2 vols. 4to." This work was translated into English in the same year, and afterwards went through many editions in that language.-TR.

medicine and surgery which he could procure. These latter sciences had excited such a passion in the mind of the student, that he was one day caught in the act of carrying into his room, for dissection, the head of a child who had died of an unknown disease.

Yet Watt did not destine himself either to botany, or to mineralogy, or to literature, or to poetry, or to chemistry, or to natural philosophy, or to medicine, or to surgery, though he was so well prepared for each of those kinds of study. In 1755, he went to London to place himself with Mr. John Morgan, mathematical and nautical instrument maker, in Finch Lane, Cornhill. The man who was to cover England with moving powers, beside which, at least as far as their effects are concerned, the ancient and colossal machine of Marly* would be but a pigmy, entered upon

* The Machine of Marly was erected at the village of that name upon the Seine, by Rennequin of Liege, for Louis XIV. in 1682, to raise water for the town and water-works of Versailles. This was effected by means of fourteen large water-wheels, and a series of pumps, pipes, cranks, and rods, remarkable for their complexity and the noise they made in working. In 1786-87, Mr. Watt and Mr. Boulton proceeded to Paris at the instance of the French Government, to suggest improvements on this machine, which were not carried into effect in consequence of financial difficulties, and the dismissal of the ministry. Since then, a steamengine has been erected by the French to do part of the work; and two of the wheels, with improved apparatus, are all that remain of this cumbersome machinery. It is amusing, in the present state of hydraulic science, to read an account of the Machine of Marly, such as is given in Desaguliers ·- "When he," says that writer, that comes to take a view of the engine at Marly, sees it cover a mile of ground in length, and the breadth greater than that of the whole river Seine-he cannot but look upon it as a stupendous machine. It is said that the Machine at Marly cost above

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his career of industry by constructing, with his own hands, fine, delicate, fragile instruments, those small but beautiful reflecting sextants to which the art of navigation owes its advancement.

Watt remained not quite a year with Mr. Morgan, and returned to Glasgow, where considerable difficulties awaited him. Taking their stand on their ancient privileges, the corporations of arts and trades looked upon the young artist from London as an intruder, and obstinately refused to allow him to set up even the humblest workshop. All conciliatory measures having failed, the University of Glasgow interfered, made a grant, in favour of young Watt, of a small room in their own buildings, permitted him to establish a shop, and honoured him with the title of their mathematical instrument maker. There still exist some small instruments of that date, of exquisite workmanship, executed entirely by the hand of Watt. I may add that his son has lately submitted to my inspection the first drawings of the steam-engine, and that they are truly remarkable for the neatness, the strength and the accuracy of their outline. It was, then, not without good cause that Watt piqued himself on his manual skill.

Perhaps you may think, and not altogether without reason, that I carry my particularity very far

eighty millions of French livres, which is above four millions of pounds sterling. Some of the largest of our fire-engines, at present [1744] in use in England, will raise as much water to the same height, and not cost above ten thousand pounds." Desaguliers, Annot. upon Lecture XII. of his course of Experimental Philosophy.-TR.

in claiming for our fellow-member a merit which can hardly add to his glory. But I am not ashamed to confess that I never listen to the pedantic enumeration of the qualifications which eminent men have not possessed, without recollecting that bad General of the time of Louis XIV., who always kept his right shoulder very high, because Prince Eugène of Savoy was a little hump-backed, and thought that he thereby was exempted from trying to carry the resemblance further.

Watt had scarcely reached his twenty-first year when the University of Glasgow attached him to itself. His patrons were ADAM SMITH, the author of the famous work on the Wealth of Nations; BLACK, whom his discoveries with regard to latent heat and the carbonate of lime, raised to a distinguished place among the first chemists of the eighteenth century; ROBERT SIMSON, the celebrated restorer of the most important treatises of the ancient geometers.*

Those eminent persons at first thought, that they had rescued from the molestations of the corporate bodies only a skilful, zealous, and amiable artificer; but they were not long of recognising also the man of rare merit, and vowed to him the most ardent friendship. The students in the university shared also in the honour of being admitted

* Dr. Dick, the Professor of Natural Philosophy, might also with propriety have been included in this number. Mr. Watt and Dr. Robison were always accustomed to speak of him as a most able He was also Mr. Watt's strenuous friend, and it was through his recommendation that he went to Mr. Morgan.-TR.

man.