year received from the voice of the most illustrious of his contemporaries the honors 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 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 methodizing 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 pourea 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 exponding, for hours together, the metaphysical theories of the German logicians, or criticising the measures or the matter of the German poetry. "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 or 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." JAMES BRINDLEY. JAMES BRINDLEY, the celebrated engineer, was entirely self taught in even the rudiments of mechanical science, although, unfortunately, we are not in possession of any very minute details of the manner in which his powerful genius first found its way to the knowledge of those laws of nature of which it afterwards made so many admirable applications. He was born at Tunsted, in the parish of Wormhill, Derbyshire, in the year 1716; and all we know of the first seventeen years of his life is, that his father, having reduced himself to extreme poverty by his dissipated habits, he was allowed to grow up almost totally uneducated, and, from the time he was able to do any thing, was employed in the ordinary descriptions of country labor. To the end of his life this great genius was barely able to read on any very pressing occasion; for, generally speaking, he would no more have thought of looking into a book for any information he wanted, than of seeking for it in the heart of a millstone: and his know. ledge of the art of writing hardly extended farther than the accomplishment of signing his name. It is probable, that as he grew towards manhood, he began to feel himself created for higher things than driving a cart or following a plough; and we may even venture to conjecture, that the particular bias of his genius towards mechanical invention had already disclosed itself, when, at the age of seventeen, he bound himself apprentice to a person of the name of Bennet, a millwright, residing at Macclesfield, which was but a few miles from his native piace. At all events, it is certain that he almost immediately displayed a wonderful natural aptitude for the profession he had chosen. "In the early part of his apprenticeship," says the writer of his life in the Biographia Britannica,' who was supplied with the materials of his article by Mr. Henshall, Brindley's brother-in-law, "he was frequently left by himself for whole weeks together, to execute works concerning which his master had given him no previous instructions. These works, therefore, he finished in his own way; and Mr. Bennet was often astonished at the improvements his apprentice from time to time introduced into the millwright business, and earnestly questioned him from whom he had gained his knowledge. He had not been long at the trade, before the millers, wherever he had been employed, always chose him again in preference to the master, or any other workman; and before the expiration of his servitude, at which time Mr. Bennet, who was advanced in years, grew unable to work, Mr. Brindley, by his ingenuity and application, kept up the business with credit, and even supported the old man and his family in a comfortable manner. His master, indeed, from all that we hear of him, does not ap pear to have been very capable of teaching him much of any thing; and Brindley seems to have been left to pick up his knowledge of the business in the best way he could, by his own observation and sagacity. Bennet having been employed on one occasion, we are told, to build the machinery of a paper-mill, which he had never seen in his life, took a journey to a distant part of the country expressly for the purpose of inspecting one which might serve him for a model. However, he had made his observations, it would seem, to very little purpose; for, having returned home and fallen to work, he could make nothing of the business at all, and was only bewildering himself, when a stranger, who understood something of such matters, happening one day to see what he was about, felt no scruple in remarking in the neighborhood that the man was only throwing away his employer's money. The reports which in consequence got abroad soon reached the ears of Brindley, who had been employed on the machinery under the directions of his master. Having probably of himself begun ere this to suspect that all was not right, his suspicions were only confirmed by what he heard; but, aware how unlikely it was that his master would be able to explain matters, or even to assist him in getting out of his difficulties, he |