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- 
eated 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. Robert 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. 
