380 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- 
