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 

 blot the institutions of a great nation ! 



Let us trust to the future. A time will come 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 good sense assign to 

 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 w'll 

 dig spacious galleries there, and will clear them in a 

 few minutes of the immense volumes of w^ater 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 pei-iodical 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, 



