M. Arago's Biographical Memoir of James Watt. 295 



narchs banished, forsaken, proscribed, and replaced upon their 

 thrones by mere soldiers of fortune, who have hewn out their 

 reno^Ti by their swords, surely I might be permitted to hope 

 that the time had passed when it would be attempted to divide 

 men into exclusive classes ; that, at all events, it would not 

 be declared openly, and in the style of the inflexible code of 

 the Pharaohs : Whatever may be your services, your virtues, 

 or your acquirements, not one of you shall ever rise above the 

 level of yom' caste ; in a word, that such a senseless custom 

 (since custom it is) should no longer be permitted to disfigure 

 the institutions of a great people. 



Let us hope better things of the future. The time will 

 come when the science of destruction shall decline before the 

 arts of peace ; when the genius which multiplies our powers, 

 which creates new products, and dispenses comfort throughout 

 immense masses of oiu- population, shall occupy, in general 

 esteem, the place which reason and sound sense have even now 

 assigned to it. 



Watt will then appear before the grand jury of the popu- 

 lation of the two hemispheres. They will see him, assisted by 

 his steam-engine, penetrating in a few weeks into the bowels 

 of the earth, to depths, which, before his time, could only 

 have been reached after an age of the most difficult labour ; 

 he will there clear out spacious galleries, and free them, in 

 a few minutes, from the vast volumes of water which daily 

 overflow them, and thus will he procure from the virgin earth 

 those inexhaustible mineral riches which nature has there 

 deposited. Uniting delicacy to power, Watt will be seen 

 twisting with the same success, the huge folds of the colossal 

 cable by means of which the stately vessel rides secure amid 

 raging seas, and the microscopic filaments of those laces and 

 airy gauzes, upon which fashion ever so much depends in the 

 preparation of her light but fascinating adornments. A few 

 strokes of the same machine will drain vast marshes, and give 

 them up to husbandry ; and districts already fertile will by it 

 be freed from the periodic influence of those deadly miasmata 

 produced by the scorching heat of the summer sun. Those 

 great mechanical powers, which are only to be found in moun- 

 tainous regions, at the foot of rapid cascades, will now, thanks 



