BRAIN WORK AND MANUAL WORK. 2O/ 



jeweller's apprentice Fulton, the millwright Rennie, the 

 mason Telford, and hundreds of others whose very 

 names remain unknown, were, as Mr. Smiles justly says, 

 " the real makers of modern civilisation " ; while the 

 professional men of science, provided with all means for 

 acquiring knowledge and experimenting, have invented 

 little in the formidable array of implements, machines, 

 and prime-motors, which has shown to humanity how to 

 utilise and to manage the forces of nature.* The fact is 

 striking, but its explanation is very simple : those men 

 the Watts and the Stephensons knew something 

 which the savants do not know they knew the use of 

 their hands ; their surroundings stimulated their in- 

 ventive powers; they knew machines, their leading 

 principles, and their work; they had breathed the 

 atmosphere of the workshop and the building-yard. 



We know how men of science will meet, the reproach. 

 They will say : " We discover the laws of nature, let 

 others apply them ; it is a simple division of labour ". 

 But such a rejoinder would be utterly untrue. The 

 march of progress is quite the reverse, because in a hun- 

 dred cases against one the mechanical invention comes 

 before the discovery of the scientific law. It was not 

 the dynamical theory of heat which came before the 

 steam-engine it followed it. When thousands of en- 

 gines already were transforming heat into motion under 

 the eyes of hundreds of professors, and when they had 

 done so for half a century, or more ; when thousands of 

 trains, stopped by powerful brakes, were disengaging 

 heat and spreading sheaves of sparks on the rails at 

 their approach to the stations ; when all over the civilised 

 world heavy hammers and perforators were rendering 

 burning hot the masses of iron they were hammer- 



* Chemistry is, to a great extent, an exception to the rule. Is it not 

 because the chemist is to such an extent a manual worker ? Besides* 

 during the last ten years we see a decided revival in scientific inventive- 

 ness, especially in physics that is, in a branch in which the enginee* 

 and the man zf science meet so much together., 



