Creek, in Madison County; the few sowing maize, | island of Mauritius, and a strong hold in Hindustan, growing fruit, and singing psalms; the many starving has lost all those possessions, and exchanged her vineon the soil, cutting down the oak and maple, alienating yards and corn-fields on the Rhine for the snows of the best acres, pining after their brethren who have Savoy and the sands of Algiers. Piedmont and Prussia, thrown the white man's gift in his face, and gone away on the other hand, have sprung into the foremost rank with their weapons and war-paint. Red Jacket at the of nations. Piedmont has become Italy, with a capital Falls, Bill Beechtree at Oneida Creek-the first selling in Milan and Venice, Florence and Naples, as well as in beaded work to girls, the second twisting hickory canes Rome. Still more striking and more glorious has been for boys-are the last representatives of mighty nations, the growth of Prussia. A hundred years ago Prussia hunters and warriors, who at one time owned the broad was just emerging into notice as a small but welllands from the Susquehannah to Lake Erie. Red governed and hard-fighting country, with a territory no Jacket will not settle; Beechtree is incapable of work. larger than Michigan, and a population considerably The red-skin will not dig, and to beg he is not ashamed. | less than Ohio. In a hundred years this small but wellHence, he has been pushed away from his place, driven governed and hard-fighting_Prussia has become the first out by the spade, and kept at bay by the smoke of military power on earth. Russia, during these hundred chimney fires. A wild man of the plain and forest, he years, has carried her arms into Finland, Crim Tartary, makes his home with the wolf, the rattlesnake, the buf- the Caucasus, and the Mohammedan Khanates, extendfalo, and the elk. When the wild beast flees, the wild ing the White empire on the Caspian and the Euxine, man follows. The Alleghany slopes, on which, only and along the Oxus and Jaxartes into Central Asia. seventy years ago, he chased the elk and scalped the Vaster still have been the marches and the conquests white woman, will hear his war-whoop, see his war- of Great Britain, her command of the ocean giving her dance, feel his scalping-knife, no more. In the western facilities which are not possessed by any other power. country he is still a figure in the landscape. From the Within a hundred years or thereabouts, she has grown Missouri to the Colorado he is master of all the open from a kingdom of ten millions of people into an empire plains; the forts which the white men have built to pro- of two hundred and twenty millions, with a territory tect their roads to San Francisco, like the Turkish covering nearly one-third of the earth. Hardly less block-houses built along the Syrian tracks, being mainly striking than the progress of Russia and England has of use as a hint of their great reserve of power. The red been that of the United States. Starting with a populamen find it hard to lay down a tomahawk, to take up a tion no larger than that of Greece, the Republic has hoe; some thousands of them only yet have done so; advanced so rapidly that in a hundred years she has some hundreds only have learned from the whites to become the third power as to size of territory, the fourth drink gin and bitters, to lodge in frame-houses, to tear as to wealth of population in the world. up the soil, to forget the chase, the war-dance, and the Great Spirit. natural basis of growth is land, the natural basis of strength is population. Taking these two elements together, the Chinese were, a hundred years ago, the foremost family of mankind. They held a territory covering three millions of square miles, and a population counting more than four hundred millions of souls. But what a change has taken place! China has been standing still, while England, Russia, and America have been conquering, planting, and annexing lands. Soil and population are the two prime elements of power. Climate and fertility count for much; nationThe Yellow Man, generally a Chinese, often a Malay,ality and compactness count for more; but still the sometimes a Dyak, has been drawn into the Pacific states from Asia, and from the Eastern Archipelago, by the hot demand for labour; any kind of which comes to him as a boon. From digging in the mine to cooking an omelette and ironing a shirt, he is equal to everything by which dollars can be gained. Of these yellow people there are now sixty thousand in California, Utah, and Montana; they come and go; but many more of them come than go. As yet these harmless crowds are weak and useful. Hop Chang keeps a laundry; Chi Hi goes out as cook; Cum Thing is a maid-of-all-work. They are in no man's way, and they labour for a crust of bread. To-day, those yellow men are sixty thousand strong. They will ask for votes. They will hold the balance of parties. In some districts they will make a majority; selecting the judges, forming the juries, interpreting the laws. Those yellow men are Buddhists, professing polygamy, practising infanticide. Next year is not more sure to come in its own season, than a great society of Asiatics to dwell on the Pacific slopes. A Buddhist church, fronting the Buddhist churches in China and Ceylon, will rise in California, Oregon, and Nevada. More than all, a war of labour will commence which thrive on rice; one of those wars in which the victory is not necessarily with the strong. between the races which feed on beef and the races JOHN FORSTER. This indefatigable literary student and biographer was a native of Newcastle, born in 1812. Coming early to London, he studied at the London University, and became a contributor to periodical works. He was called to the bar, but never practised. In 1834 he joined the Examiner newspaper as assistant editor, and on the retirement of Mr Albany Fonblanque, he became sole editor, and continued so for ten years. duced, through friendship with Charles Dickens, He was into become, in 1846, editor of the Daily News, but held that laborious office for only about eleven months. His future life was devoted to literary labours-chiefly to historical and literary biographies. His principal works are-Statesmen of the Commonwealth of England, 1831-4; Life of Oliver Goldsmith, 1848; Biographical and HistoriThe European races are spreading over every conti-cal Essays, 1859; Arrest of the Five Members by nent, and mastering the isles and islets of every sea. During those hundred years some powers have shot ahead, and some have slipped into the second rank. Austria, a hundred years ago, the leading power in Europe, has been rent asunder and has forfeited her throne in Germany. Spain, a hundred years ago, the first colonial empire in the world, has lost her colonies and conquests, and has sunk into a third-rate power. France, which little more than a hundred years ago possessed Canada, Louisiana, the Mississippi Valley, the 642 A Hundred Years of White Progress. From the White Conquest. 1860; Sir John Eliot, a Biography, 1864; Walter Charles I.; Debates on the Grand Remonstrance, Savage Landor, a Biography, 1868; and Life of Charles Dickens, three volumes, 1871-4. In 1875 Mr Forster published the first volume of a new Life of Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick's, which was to be completed in three volumes. This volume is enriched with much new and valuable information, and, like all Mr Forster's biographies, the work promised to be thoroughly exhaustive. "Swift's later time, when he was governing Ireland as well as his deanery, and the world was filled with the fame of Gulliver, is,' says Mr Forster, 'broadly and intelligibly written. But as to all the rest, his life is a work unfinished; to which no one has brought the minute examination indispensably required, where the whole of a career has to be considered to get at the proper comprehension of single parts of it. The writers accepted as authorities for the obscurer portion are found to be practically worthless, and the defect is not supplied by the later and greater biographers. Johnson did him no kind of justice, because of too little liking for him; and Scott, with much hearty liking as well as a generous admiration, had too much other work to do. Thus, notwithstanding noble passages in both memoirs, and Scott's pervading tone of healthy, manly wisdom, it is left to an inferior hand to attempt to complete the tribute begun by those distinguished men.' selves, the subject of copyright might have been equitably settled when attention was first drawn to it; but while De Foe was urging the author's claim, Swift was calling De Foe a fellow that had been pilloried, and we have still to discuss as in forma pauperis the rights of the English author. of the highest English court, it is the word which Confiscation is a hard word, but after the decision alone describes fairly the statute of Anne, for encouragement of literature. That is now superseded by another statute, having the same gorgeous name, and the same inglorious meaning; for even this last enactment, sorely resisted as it was, leaves England behind any other country in the world, in the amount of their own property secured to her authors. In some, to this day, perpetual copyright exists; and though it may be reasonable, as Dr Johnson argued that it was, to surrender a part for greater efficiency or protection to the rest, yet the commonest dictates of natural justice might beggared of their inheritance as soon as his own capacity at least require that an author's family should not be to provide for them may have ceased. In every continental country this is cared for, the lowest term secured by the most niggardly arrangement being twenty-five years; whereas in England it is the munificent number of seven. Yet the most laborious works, and often the most delightful, are for the most part of a kind which the hereafter only can repay. The poet, the historian, the scientific investigator, do indeed find readers to-day; but if they have laboured with success, they have proand temporary, but the limited and constant nature of duced books whose substantial reward is not the large their sale. No consideration of moral right exists, no principle of economical science can be stated, which would justify the seizure of such books by the public, before they had the chance of remunerating the genius and the labour of their producers. The true Mr Forster lived to publish only one volume. We may add that the biographer was successful in life. His name stood well with publishers and readers. In 1855 he was appointed Secretary to the Lunacy Commission, and in 1861, a Commissioner in Lunacy. Few Englishmen of this generation,' says a friendly writer in the Times, have combined such unflinching firmness and honesty of purpose with such real tenderness and sympathy for all with whom they were brought into contact. Many there were who, at first sight, thought John Forster obstinate and overbearing, who, on But though parliament can easily commit this wrong, further acquaintance, were ready to confess that, it is not in such case the quarter to look to for redress. in reality, he was one of the tenderest and most There is no hope of a better state of things till the generous of men.' Mr Forster bequeathed his author shall enlist upon his side the power of which books and manuscripts to the nation-a valuable parliament is but the inferior expression. bequest-and they remain in the South Kensing-remedy for literary wrongs must flow from a higher ton Museum. A similar bequest was made by Mr Forster's friend, ALEXANDER DYCE (1798-1869), the editor of Shakspeare and of the dramatic works of Peele, Greene, Marlowe, and Beaumont and Fletcher. Mr Dyce was born in Edinburgh, son of General Dyce, in the Honourable East India Company's Service. Having studied at Edinburgh University and at Exeter College, Oxford, he entered into holy orders, and was successively curate in Fowey, Cornwall, and Nayland in Suffolk. Mr Dyce was a faithful and learned editor. His latest employment was revising the second edition of his Shakspeare; and the third edition was published by Mr Forster in 1874. The Literary Profession and Law of Copyright. From Forster's Life of Oliver Goldsmith. 'It were well,' said Goldsmith, on one occasion, with bitter truth, if none but the dunces of society were combined to render the profession of an author ridiculous or unhappy.' The profession themselves have yet to learn the secret of co-operation; they have to put away internal jealousies; they have to claim for themselves, as poor Goldsmith, after his fashion, very loudly did, that defined position from which greater respect, and more frequent consideration in public life, could not long be withheld; in fine, they have frankly to feel that their vocation, properly regarded, ranks with the worthiest, and that, on all occasions, to do justice to it, and to each other, is the way to obtain justice from the world. If writers had been thus true to them sense than has at any period yet prevailed in England of the duties and responsibilities assumed by the public writer, and of the social consideration and respect that their effectual discharge should have undisputed right to claim. The world will be greatly the gainer, when such time shall arrive, and when the biography of the man of genius shall no longer be a picture of the most harsh struggles and mean necessities to which man's life is subject, exhibited as in shameful contrast to the calm and classic glory of his fame. With society itself rests the advent of that time.* But no smith and the supposed neglect of authors with the opinion of 643 PROFESSOR MASSON-SIR JAMES STEPHEN. The Life of John Milton, narrated in connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time, volume i., 1608-1639, by DAVID MASSON, Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the university of Edinburgh, promises to be by far the most accurate as well as the fullest memoir of the great poet. As if to oblige biography in this instance to pass into history, Milton's life divides itself with almost mechanical exactness into three periods, corresponding with those of the contemporary social movement-the first extending from 1608 to 1640, which was the period of his education and of his minor poems; the second extending from 1640 to 1660, or from the beginning of the civil wars to the Restoration, and forming the middle period of his polemical activity as a prose-writer; and the third extending from 1660 to 1674, which was the period of his later muse and of the publication of Paradise Lost. It is the plan of the present work to devote a volume to each of those periods. Such is the herculean task Mr Masson has laid out for himself. He has cleared up many doubtful points in the poet's pedigree and academical career, and given a great mass of interesting information, literary, historical, and ecclesiastical, conveyed in vigorous and often eloquent language. A second volume of the Life of Milton was published in 1871, and a third in 1873. Character of Archbishop Laud. What with one means of influence, what with another, Laud, in the year 1632, being then in the sixtieth year of his age, was the dominant spirit in the English Church, and one of the chiefs of the English state. One would fain think and speak with some respect of any man who has been beheaded; much more of one who was beheaded for a cause to which he had conscientiously devoted his life, and which thousands of his countrymen, two centuries after his death, still adhere to, still expound, still uphold, albeit with the difference, incalculable to themselves, of all that time has flung between. But it is impossible to like or admire Laud. The nearer we get to him, the more all soft illusion falls off, and the more distinctly we have before us the hard reality, as D'Ewes and others saw it, of a 'little, low, red-faced man,' bustling by the side of that king of the narrow forehead and the melancholy Vandyck air, or pressing his notions with a raspy voice at the council-board till Weston became peevish and Cottington wickedly solemn, or bowing his head in churches not very gracefully. When we examine what remains of his mind in writings, the estimate is not enhanced. The texture of his writing is hard, dry, and common; sufficiently clear as to the meaning, and with no insincerity or superfluity, but without sap, radiance, or force. Occasionally, when one of his fundamental topics is touched, a kind of dull heat rises, and one can see that the old man was in earnest. Of anything like depth or comprehensiveness of intellect, there is no evidence; much less of what is understood by genius. There is never a stroke of original insight; never a flash of intellectual generality. In Williams there is genius; not in Laud. Many of his humble clerical contemporaries, not to by promising to execute works which he never begun. length this source of supply failed. He owed more than £2000; But at and he saw no hope of extrication from his embarrassments. His spirits and health gave way.' speak of such known men as Fuller and Hacket, must have been greatly his superiors in talent-more discerning men, as well as more interesting writers. That very ecclesiastical cause which Laud so conspicuously defended, has had, since his time, and has at this day in England, far abler heads among its adherents. How was it, then, that Laud became what he did become, how was it that his precise personality and no other and that slowly, by degrees, and against opposition ? worked its way upwards, through the clerical and academic element of the time, to the very top of all, and there fitted itself into the very socket where the joints of things met? Parvo regitur mundus intellectu. A small intellect, once in the position of government, may suffice for the official forms of it; and with Laud's laboriousness and tenacity of purpose, his power of maintaining his place of minister, under such a master as Charles, needs be no mystery. So long as the proprietor of an estate is satisfied, the tenants must endure the bailiff, whatever the amount of his wisdom. Then, again, in the last stages of Laud's ascent, he rose through Buckingham and Charles, to both of whom surely his itself by adequate affinities. nature, without being great, may have recommended Still, that Laud impressed these men when he did come in contact with them, and that, from his original position as a poor student in an Oxford college, he rose step by step to the point where he could come in contact with them, are facts not explicable by the mere supposition of a series of external accidents. Perhaps it is that a nature does not always or necessarily rise by greatness, or intrinsic superiority to the element about it, but may rise by peculiarity, or proper capillary relation to the element about it. When Lord Macaulay speaks of Laud as intellectually an 'imbecile,' and calls him a ridiculous old bigot,' he seems to omit that peculiarity which gave Laud's nature, whatever its measure by a modern standard, so much force and pungency among his contemporaries. To have hold of the surrounding sensations of men, even by pain and irritation, is a kind of power; and Laud had that kind of power from the first. He affected strongly, if irritatingly, each successive part of the body-politic in which he was lodged. As a fellow of a college, he was more felt than liked; as a master of a college, he was still felt, but not liked; when he came first about court, he was felt still, but still not liked. And why was he felt? Why, in each successive position to which he attained, did he affect surrounding sensation so as to domineer? For one thing, he was a man whose views, if few, were extraordinarily definite. His nature, if not great, was very tight. Early in life he had taken up certain propositions as to the proper theology of the Anglican Church, and had combined them with certain others as to the divine right of Prelacy, and the necessity and possibility of uniformity in creed and worship. These few very definite propositions, each answering to some tendency of society or of opinion at the time in England, he had tied and knotted round him as his sufficient doctrinal outfit. Wherever he went, he carried them with him and before him, acting upon them with a brisk and incessant perseverance, without regard to circumstances, or even to establish notices of what was fair, high-minded, and generous. Thus, seeing that the propositions were of a kind upon which some conclusion or other was or might be made socially imperative, he could force to his own conclusions all laxer, though larger natures, that were tending lazily the same way, and, throwing a continually increasing crowd of such and of others behind him as his followers, leave only in front of him those who opposed to his conclusions as resolute contraries. His indefatigable official activity contributed to the result. Beyond all this, however, and adding secret force to it all, there was something to enforce was one of strict secular form, the man's own else about Laud. Though the system which he wanted being rested on a trembling basis of the fantastic and unearthly. Herein lay one notable, and perhaps compensating difference between his narrow intellect and the broad but secular genius of Williams. In that strange diary of Laud, which is one of the curiosities of our literature, we see him in an aspect in which he probably never wished that the public should know him. His hard and active public life is represented there but casually, and we see the man in the secrecy of his own thoughts, as he talked to himself when alone. We hear of certain sins, or, at least,' unfortunatenesses,' of his early and past life, which clung about his memory, were kept there by anniversaries of sadness or penance, and sometimes intruded grinning faces through the gloom of the chamber when all the house was asleep. We see that, after all, whether from such causes or from some form of constitutional melancholy, the old man, who walked so briskly and cheerily about the court, and was so sharp and unhesitating in all his notions of what was to be done in secret, carry in him some sense of the burden of life's mystery, and feel the air and the earth to some depth around him to be full of sounds and agencies unfeatured and unimaginable. At any moment they may break through! The twitter of two robin red breasts in his room, as he is writing a sermon, sets his heart beating; a curtain rustles whose hand touched it? Above all, he has a belief in revelation through dreams and coincidences; and as the very definiteness of his scheme of external worship may have been a refuge to him from that total mystery, the skirts of which, and only the skirts, were ever touching him, so in his dreams and small omens he seems to have had, in his daily advocacy of that scheme, some petty sense of near metaphysical aid. Out of his many dreams we are fond of this one: 'January 5 [1626-7]. Epiphany Eve and Friday, in the night I dreamed,' he says, that my mother, long since dead, stood by my bed, and drawing aside the clothes a little, looked pleasantly upon me, and that I was glad to see her with so merry an aspect. She then shewed to me a certain old man, long since deceased, whom, while alive, I both knew and loved. He seemed to lie upon the ground, merry enough, but with a wrinkled countenance. His name was Grove. While I prepared to salute him, I awoke.' Were one to adopt what seems to have been Laud's own theory, might not one suppose that this wrinkled old man of his dream, squat on the supernatural ground so near its confines with the natural, was Laud's spiritual genius, and so that what of the supernatural there was in his policy consisted mainly of monitions from Grove of Reading? The question would still remain—at what depth back among the dead Grove was permitted to roam? Mr Masson has published Essays Biographical and Critical, 1856; British Novelists and their Styles, 1859; Recent British Philosophy, 1865; The Life of William Drummond of Hawthornden, 1873; &c. Mr Masson has also been a copious contributor to our reviews, magazines, and other literary journals. He is a native of Aberdeen (born Dec. 22, 1822), and enjoys universal respect as a genial and accomplished author, professor, and member of the literary society of the Scottish capital. Luther's Satan. Milton's Satan and Goethe's Mephistopheles are literary performances; and, for what they prove, neither Milton nor Goethe need have believed in a devil at all. Luther's devil, on the other hand, was a being recognised by him as actually existing-as existing, one might say, with a vengeance. The strong conviction which Luther had on this point is a feature in his character. The narrative of his life abounds in anecdotes, shewing that the devil with him was no chimera, no mere orthodoxy, no fiction. In every page of his writings we have the word Teufel, Teufel, repeated again and again. Occasionally there occurs an express dissertation upon the nature and functions of the evil spirit; and one of the longest chapters in his Table-talk is that entitled 'The Devil and his Works-indicating that his conversation with his friends often turned on the subject of Satanic agency. Teufel was actually the strongest signification he had; and whenever he was excited to his highest emotional pitch, it came in to assist his utterance at the climax, and give him a corresponding powerful expression. This thing I will do,' it was common for him to say, 'in spite of all who may oppose me, be it duke, emperor, priest, bishop, cardinal, pope, or devil.' Man's heart, he says, is a 'Stock, Stein, Eisen, Teufel, hart Herz' (a stock, stone, iron, devil, hard heart). And it was not a mere vague conception he had of this being, such as theology might oblige. On the contrary, he had observed him as a man would his personal enemy, and in so doing had formed a great many conclusions regarding his powers and his character. In general, Luther's devil may be defined as a personification, in the spirit of Scripture, of the resisting medium which Luther had to coil his way through-spiritual fears, passionate uprisings, fainting resolutions, within himself; error, weakness, envy, in those around him; and, without, a whole world howling for his destruction. It is in effect as if Luther had said: Scripture reveals to me the existence of a great accursed being, whose function it is to produce evil. It is for me to ascertain the character of this being, whom I, of all men, have to deal with. And how am I to do so except by observing him working? God knows I have not far to go in quest of his manifestations.' And thus Luther went on filling up the scriptural proposition with his daily experience. He was constantly gaining a clearer conception of his great personal antagonist, constantly stumbling upon some more concealed trait in the spirit's character. The being himself was invisible; but men were walking in the midst of his manifestations. History to Luther was not a physical course of events. It was God acting and the devil opposing. London Suburbs-Hampstead. London, with all the evils resulting from its vastness, has suburbs as rich and beautiful, after the English style of scenery, as any in the world; and even now, despite the encroachments of the ever-encroaching brick and mortar on the surrounding country, the neighbourhood of Hampstead and Highgate, near London, is one in which the lover of natural beauty and the solitary might well delight. The ground is much the highest round London; there are real heights and hollows, so that the omnibuses coming from town have put on additional horses; you ascend steep roads, lying in part through villages or quaint shops, and old high-gabled brick houses, still distinct from the great city, though about to be devoured by it-in part through straggling lines of villas, with gardens and grassy parks round them, and here and there an old inn; and from the highest eminences, when the view is clear, you can see London left behind, a mass of purplish mist, with domes and steeples visible through it. When the villages end, you are really in the country. There is the Heath, on the Hampstead side-an extensive tract of knolls and little glens, covered here and there with furze, all abloom with yellow in the summer, when the larks may be heard singing over it; threaded here and there by paths with seats in them, or broken by clumps of trees, and blue rusty-nailed palings, which inclose oldfashioned family-houses and shrubberies, where the coachman in livery may be seen talking lazily to the gardener, but containing also sequestered spots where one might wander alone for hours, or lie concealed amid the sheltering furze. At night, Hampstead Heath would be as ghastly a place to wander in as an uneasy spirit could desire. In every hollow seen in the starlight, one 645 could fancy that there had been a murder; nay, tradition points to spots where foul crimes have been committed, or where, in the dead of night, forgers, who had walked, with discovery on their track, along dark intervening roads from the hell of lamp-lit London, had lain down and poisoned themselves. In the day, however, and especially on a bright summer day, the scene is open, healthy, and cheerful. The Essays on Ecclesiastical Biography by SIR JAMES STEPHEN (1789-1859), contain brief memoirs of Hildebrand, St Francis of Assisi, Loyola, Luther, Baxter, Wilberforce, the founders of Jesuitism, the Port-Royalists, the Clapham Sect, &c. As originally published in the Edinburgh Review, these essays were nearly as popular with a large body of readers as those of Macaulay, though on less attractive subjects. They were first published in a collective form in 1849, and have gone through several editions. Sir James Stephen was long legal adviser to the Colonial Office, then assistant Under-secretary to the Colonial Office, and afterwards Under-secretary of State, which office he held from 1836 to 1847. He was a valuable public servant and good man. letters and figures the result of some calculation he was carrying on: he put various questions to him, and ended by remarking, 'he is no common child.' Sitting one evening with his aunt, Mrs Muirhead, at the tea-table, she said: 'James Watt, I never saw such an idle boy: take a book, or employ yourself usefully. For the last hour, you have not spoken one word, but taken off the lid of that kettle and put it on again, holding now a cup and now a silver spoon over the steam.' James was already observing the process of condensation. Before he was fifteen years of age, he had made for himself a small electrical machine, with which he sometimes startled his young friends by giving them sudden shocks from it. This must have been only a few years after the Leyden phial was invented. His father's store-rooms, in which he kept a stock of telethe supply of ships at Greenock, were a valuable scopes, quadrants, and optical instruments for school of observation to the young philosopher, and may have tended to decide the profession which he selected for himself-that of mathematical instrument-maker. At the age of eighteen, he removed to Glasgow to learn this business, and a year afterwards repaired to London for the same purpose. But bad health-'a gnawing J. P. MUIRHEAD (Life of Watt)-S. SMILES (Life pain in his back, and weariness all over his body of Stephenson). -obliged him to quit London in the year 1756; A relative of James Watt, JAMES PATRICK and after investing about twenty guineas in tools MUIRHEAD, M. A., who had access to all the family and useful books on his trade, he returned to papers, published a volume in 1854, entitled The Scotland. In 1757 he received permission to Origin and Progress of the Mechanical Inventions occupy an apartment and open a shop within the of James Watt; three volumes, 1858. The large precincts of the college of Glasgow, and to use the copper-plate engravings of machinery by which it designation of mathematical instrument-maker to was illustrated necessarily raised the cost of this the university.' And now, in his twenty-first year, work above the means of most people, while the may be said to have commenced the wonderful minute descriptions of patents and their relative career of James Watt as a man of inventive genius. drawings were more desirable for the use of the Business was sufficiently prosperous, and in his scientific engineer and the mechanical philoso- leisure hours he studied without intermission. pher than of the general reader. To meet the Observare' was the motto he adopted, and his wishes of the latter, Mr Muirhead, in 1858, remod- object, as he himself expressed it, was 'to find out elled and reproduced, in a form at once more the weak side of Nature, and to vanquish her;' comprehensive, more convenient, and less costly, for Nature,' he says again, 'has a weak side, if the biographical memoir of Watt, incorporating we can only find it out. Nothing came amiss. with it the most interesting passages in his cor- Without knowing one musical note from another, respondence, and, as far as possible, Watt's own he undertook to build an organ for a mason-lodge clear and forcible descriptions of his inventions. in Glasgow. He had studied the philosophical This volume furnishes an interesting account of theory of music, and not only did he make the the career of the great inventor, of whom Sir organ, but in the process a thousand things Walter Scott has said that he was 'not only the occurred to him which no organ-builder ever most profound man of science, the most successful dreamed of-nice indicators of the strength of the combiner of powers and calculator of numbers, as blast, regulators of it, &c. He afterwards made adapted to practical purposes-was not only one of many organs; and guitars, flutes, and violins of the most generally well-informed, but one of the his manufacture are still in existence. best and kindest of human beings.' James Watt this time he also contrived an ingenious machine was born on the 19th of January 1736, at Greenock, for drawing in perspective. The great discovery and came of a family that for more than a which led to the ultimate triumphs of the steamhundred years had more or less professed mathe-engine was made when Watt was only twentymatics and navigation. Many stories are told of his early turn for science. When he was six years of age, a gentleman, calling on his father, observed the child bending over a marble hearth with a piece of coloured chalk in his hand. 'Mr Watt,' said he, 'you ought to send that boy to a public school, and not allow him to trifle away his time at home.' 'Look how my child is occupied before you condemn him,' replied the father. The gentleman then observed that the boy had drawn mathematical lines and circles on the marble hearth, and was then marking in About seven or twenty-eight years of age-namely, in 1764 or 1765. Dr Black, an intimate friend, thus narrates the circumstance: The Steam-engine. employed by the Professor of Natural Philosophy to A few years after he was settled at Glasgow, he was examine and rectify a small workable model of a steamengine, which was out of order. This turned a part of his thoughts and fertile invention to the nature and improvement of steam-engines, to the perfection of their machinery, and to the different means by which their |