CHAP. II. MATHEMATICAL INSTRUMENT MAKER. 13 



on his business, necessarily involved great application 

 and industry. Indeed, Smeaton was throughout life 

 an indefatigable student, bent, above all things, on 

 self-improvement. One of his maxims was, that "the 

 abilities of the individual are a debt due to the common 

 stock of public happiness ;" and the steadfastness with 

 which he devoted himself to useful work, in which he at 

 the same time found his own true happiness, shows that 

 this maxim was 110 mere lip-utterance on his part, but 

 formed the very mainspring of his life. From an early 

 period he carefully laid out his time with a view to 

 getting the most good out of it : so much for study, so 

 much for practical experiments, so much for business, 

 and so much for rest and relaxation. 



We infer that Smeaton could never have had a large 

 business as a philosophical instrument maker from the 

 large portion of his time that he devoted to study and 

 experiments. Probably he already felt that, in the 

 course of the development of English industry, a field 

 was opening before him of a more important character 

 than any that was likely to present itself in the mathe- 

 matical instrument line. He accordingly seems early to 

 have turned his attention to engineering, and, amongst 

 other branches of study, he devoted several hours in 

 every day to the acquisition of French, in order that he 

 might be enabled to read for himself the works on that 

 science which were then only to be found in that and the 

 Italian language. He had, however, a further object in 

 studying French, which was to enable him to make a 

 journey which he contemplated into the Low Countries, 

 for the purpose of inspecting the great canal works of 

 foreign engineers. 



Accordingly, in 1754, he set out for Holland, and 

 traversed that country and Belgium, travelling mostly 

 on foot and in treckschuyts, or canal boats, both for the 

 sake of economy, and that he might more closely inspect 

 the engineering works of the districts through which he 



