464 JAMES WATT. 



your virtues, your knowledge, not one of you shall over- 

 step the boundary of your caste ; " that a foolish custom, 

 in short, since such a custom exists, should no longer 



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blot the institutions of a great nation ! 



Let us trust to the future. A time will conie when the 

 science of destruction will bow before the arts of peace ; 

 when , the genius which multiplies our powers, which 

 creates new products, which spreads comfort among 

 masses of people, will occupy that place in the general 

 esteem of mankind, that reason and <2jood sense assign to 



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it already. 



Watt will then appear before the grand jury of the 

 two worlds. Every one will see him, aided by his steam- 

 engine, penetrate in a few weeks into the bowels of the 

 earth to depths where, before him, we could not have 

 arrived without a century's most painful efforts ; he will 

 dig spacious galleries there, and will clear them in a 

 few minutes of the immense volumes of water that used 

 to inundate them daily ; he will drag from a virgin soil 

 the inexhaustible riches that nature deposited there. 



Uniting delicacy with power, Watt will twist with 

 equal success the enormous strands of the colossal cable 

 by which the man-of-war moors itself in the midst of the 

 chafed ocean and the microscopic filaments of that lace, 

 of that aerial web, which forms so favourite a portion of 

 the various dresses introduced by fashion. 



A few oscillations of this same machine will restore to 

 agriculture vast swamps ; thus fertile countries will be 

 rescued from the periodical and fatal miasma that used 

 to be fostered there by the burning summer-suns. 



The great mechanical powers that we used to have to 

 seek in mountainous regions, at the foot of large water- 

 falls, now, thanks to Watt's discovery, will arise at will, 



