426 JAMES WATT. 



Warming by steam was more recent by three years. 

 Watt adopted it in his own house in 1783. We must 

 acknowledge that this ingenious method is found indi- 

 cated in the Philosophical Transactions for the year 

 1745 by Colonel Cooke ; * but the idea passed away 

 unheeded. At all events, Watt will not have the honour 

 only of reviving it : he was the first to apply steam ; it 

 was his calculations on the extent of surface requisite for 

 the warming of halls of various sizes, that in the begin- 

 ning served as a guide to the greater part of the English 



engineers. 



If Watt had only produced, in the course of his long 

 life, the separate condenser for the steam-engine, the 

 detent for regulating the steam, and the articulated 

 parallelogram, he would still occupy one of the highest 

 places among the small number of men whose life marks 

 an epoch in the history of the world ; but his name seems 

 to me to be splendidly connected with the greatest and 

 the most important discovery in modern chemistry : the 

 discovery of the components of water. My assertion may 

 be daring, for the numerous works in which this essential 

 point of the history of the sciences is treated ex professo, 

 have forgotten Watt. I hope, however that you will 

 follow my discussion without prejudice ; that you will 

 not allow yourselves to be deterred from the examina- 



'* I read in a work by Mr. Eobert Stuart that Sir Hugh Platte had 

 an idea, before Colonel Cooke, of the possibility of applying steam to 

 warming dwellings. In the Garden of Eden by that author, published 

 in 1660, something is said to that effect for preserving plants through 

 the winter in the green-house. Sir Hugh Platte proposes placing lids, 

 made of tin or of any other metal, over the saucepans in which the 

 viands are being cooked, and then to certain openings in these lids 

 to adapt tubes, by which the heating steam may be led wherever it is 

 desired. 



