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JAMES WATT. 



nowhere but in foreign collections ; his principal works 

 will be published beyond the Rhine ; his liberty will be 

 menaced by the revocation of the edict of Nantes ; it will 

 be in a painful exile that he will temporarily enjoy that 

 privilege of which studious men are most jealous, tran 

 quillity of mind. Let us hasten to throw a veil over the 

 deplorable results of our civil discords ; let us forget that 

 fanaticism was attached to the religious opinions of the 

 physicist of Blois and return to mechanics ; in this re 

 spect at least the orthodoxy of Papin has never been 

 disputed. 



There are two things to be considered in every ma 

 chine ; on one hand the moving power, on the other the 

 arrangement, more or less complicated, of the fixed and 

 movable parts, and by the aid of which the moving 

 power transmits its action to the resistance. At the 

 height to which mechanical knowledge has now attained, 

 the success of a machine intended to produce great effects, 

 depends chiefly on the moving power, on the way of ap 

 plying it, and economizing its action. And therefore it 

 was to produce an economical moving power capable of 

 making the piston of a large cylinder oscillate constantly, 

 that Papin devoted his life. Then to obtain from the 

 oscillations of the piston the power required to turn the 

 stones of a corn mill, the cylinders of a flatting mill, the 

 paddle-wheels of a steamboat, the bobbins of a spinning 

 mill : to raise the heavy hammer that strikes with re 

 doubled blows enormous masses of incandescent iron, on 

 its coming out of the reverberating furnace; to cut thick 

 bars of metal with the two jaws of the shears, as we cut 

 ribbon with sharp scissors : those are, I repeat it, so many 

 problems of a very secondary order, and that would not 

 puzzle the commonest engineers. We may employ our- 



