the Clyde. The joints were spherical and articulated, like those of the lobster's tail.

His workshop, of which a sketch is hereafter given, as drawn by the artist Skelton, was in the garret of his house, and was well supplied with tools and all kinds of laboratory material. His lathe and his copying-machine were placed before the window, and his writing-desk in the corner. Here he spent the greater part of his leisure time, often even taking his meals in the little shop, rather than go to the table for them. Even when very old, he occasionally made a journey to London or Glasgow, calling on his old friends and studying the latest engineering devices and inspecting public works, and was everywhere welcomed by young and old as the greatest living engineer, or as the kind and wise friend of earlier days.

He died August 19, 1819, in the eighty-third year of his age, and was buried in Handsworth Church. The sculptor Chantrey was employed to place a fitting monument above his grave, and the nation erected a statue of the great man in Westminster Abbey.

This sketch of the greatest of all the inventors of the steam-engine has been given no greater length than its subject justifies. Whether we consider Watt as the inventor of the standard steam-engine of the nineteenth century, as the scientific investigator of the physical principles upon which the invention is based, or as the builder and introducer of the most powerful known instrument by which the "great sources of power in Nature are converted, adapted, and applied for the use and convenience of man," he is fully entitled to preëminence. His character as a man was no less admirable than as an engineer.

Smiles, Watt's most conscientious and indefatigable biographer, writes:'

"Some months since, we visited the little garret at

1 "Life of Watt," p. 512.

Heathfield in which Watt pursued the investigations of his later years. The room had been carefully locked

up since his death, and had only once been swept out. Everything lay very much as he left it. The piece of

FIG. 35. James Watt's Workshop. (From Smiles's "Lives of Boulton and Watt.")

iron which he was last employed in turning, lay on the lathe. The ashes of the last fire were in the grate; the last bit of coal was in the scuttle. The Dutch oven was in its place over the stove, and the frying-pan in which he cooked his meals was hanging on its accustomed nail. Many objects lay about or in the drawers, indicating the pursuits which had been interrupted by death-busts, medallions, and figures, waiting to be copied by the copying-machinemany medallion-moulds, a store of plaster-of-Paris, and a box of plaster casts from London, the contents of which do not seem to have been disturbed. Here are Watt's ladles for melting lead, his foot-rule, his glue-pot, his hammer. Reflecting mirrors, an extemporized camera with the lenses mounted on pasteboard, and many camera-glasses laid about, indicate interrupted experiments in optics. There are quadrant-glasses, compasses, scales, weights, and sundry boxes of mathematical instruments, once doubtless highly prized. In one place a model of the governor, in another of the parallel-motion, and in a little box, fitted with wooden cylinders mounted with paper and covered with figures, is what we suppose to be a model of his calculating-machine. On the shelves are minerals and chemicals in pots and jars, on which the dust of nearly half a century has settled. The moist substances have long since dried up; the putty has been turned to stone, and the paste to dust. On one shelf we come upon a dish in which lies a withered bunch of grapes. On the floor, in a corner, near to where Watt sat and worked, is a hair-trunk-a touching memorial of a longpast love and a long-dead sorrow. It contains all poor Gregory's school-books, his first attempts at writing, his boy's drawings of battles, his first school-exercises down to his college-themes, his delectuses, his grammars, his dictionaries, and his class-books-brought into this retired room, where the father's eye could rest upon them. Near at hand is the sculpture-machine, on which he continued working to the last. Its wooden frame is worm-eaten, and dropping

into dust, like the hands that made it. But though the great workman is gone to rest, with all his griefs and cares, and his handiwork is fast crumbling to decay, the spirit of his work, the thought which he put into his inventions, still survives, and will probably continue to influence the destinies of his race for all time to come."

The visitor to Westminster Abbey will find neither monarch, nor warrior, nor statesman, nor poet, honored with a nobler epitaph than that which is inscribed on the pedestal of Chantrey's monument to Watt:

NOT TO PERPETUATE A NAME,

WHICH MUST ENDURE WHILE THE PEACEFUL ARTS FLOURISH,

BUT TO SHOW

THAT MANKIND HAVE LEARNT TO HONOR THOSE WHO BEST DESERVE THEIR

GRATITUDE,

THE KING,

HIS MINISTERS, AND MANY OF THE NOBLES AND COMMONERS OF THE REALM, RAISED THIS MONUMENT TO

JAMES WATT,

WHO, DIRECTING THE FORCE OF AN ORIGINAL GENIUS,

EARLY EXERCISED IN PHILOSOPHIC RESEARCH,

TO THE IMPROVEMENT OF

THE STEAM-ENGINE,

ENLARGED THE RESOURCES OF HIS COUNTRY, INCREASED THE POWER OF MAN,

AND ROSE TO AN EMINENT PLACE

AMONG THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS FOLLOWERS OF SCIENCE AND THE REAL

BENEFACTORS OF THE WORLD.

BORN AT GREENOCK, MDCCXXXVI.

DIED AT HEATHFIELD, IN STAFFORDSHIRE, MDCCCXIX.

SECTION II.-THE CONTEMPORARIES OF JAMES WATT.

In the chronology of the steam-engine, the contemporaries of Watt have been so completely overshadowed by the greater and more successful inventor, as to have been almost forgotten by the biographer and by the student of history. Yet, among the engineers and engine-builders, as well as among the inventors of his day, Watt found many enterprising rivals and keen competitors. Some of these men, had they not been so completely fettered by Watt's patents, would have probably done work which would have entitled them to far higher honor than has been accorded them.

WILLIAM MURDOCH was one of the men to whom Watt, no less than the world, was greatly indebted. For many years he was the assistant, friend, and coadjutor of Watt; and it is to his ingenuity that we are to give credit for not only