XXVII HUMAN PROGRESS : PAST AND FUTURE 503 



of the landed aristocracy. Yet in the short period that 

 has elapsed since they were opened to dissenters, these 

 latter have shown themselves fully equal to the heredi- 

 tarily trained churchmen, and have carried off the highest 

 honours in as great, and perhaps even in greater pro- 

 portion than their comparative numbers in the universities 

 would render probable. 



Again, it is a remarkable fact, that almost all our 

 greatest inventors and scientific discoverers, the men whose 

 originality and mental power have created landmarks in 

 the history of human progress, have been self-taught, and 

 have certainly derived nothing from the training of their 

 ancestors in their several departments of knowledge. 

 Brindley, one of the earliest of our modern engineers, was 

 the son of a dissipated small freeholder; Telford, our 

 greatest road and bridge builder, was the son of a shepherd, 

 and apprenticed to a rough country mason; George 

 Stephenson, the inventor of the locomotive engine, Avas a 

 self-taught collier ; Bramah, the inventor of the hydraulic 

 press, of improved locks, and almost the originator of 

 machine tools, was the son of a farmer, and at seventeen 

 years of age was apprenticed to the village carpenter ; 

 Smeaton, who designed and built the Edclystone light- 

 house, was the son of a lawyer, and a wholly self-taught 

 engineer ; Harrison, the inventor of the modern chrono- 

 meter, was a joiner and the son of a joiner ; the elder 

 Brunei was the son of a French peasant farmer, and was 

 educated for a priest, yet he became a great self-taught 

 engineer, designed and executed the first Thames tunnel, 

 and at the beginning of this century designed the block- 

 making machinery in Portsmouth dock-yard which was so 

 complete both in plan and execution that it is still 

 in use. 



Coming now to higher departments of industry, science, 

 and art, we find that Dolland, the inventor of the achromatic 

 telescope, was a working silk- weaver, and a wholly self- 

 taught optician ; Faraday was the son of a blacksmith, 

 and apprenticed to a bookbinder at the age of thirteen ; 

 Sir Christopher Wren, the son of a clergyman and edu- 

 cated at Oxford, was a self-taught architect, yet he 



