Polytechnic Association. 863 



than to the present generation, would be sufficiently well understood 

 to induce the payment of its actual cost, far below the real value, as 

 it may be. 



It becomes, therefore, the privilege and the duty of the wealthy 

 among our citizens to provide this great want of our country, and to 

 aid, thus most effectively, in giving her that pre-eminence among 

 nations that every patriotic citizen aspires to see her attain. 



I have referred, in another paper, to the services rendered by 

 John Stevens, of Hoboken, New Jersey, and his sons in the intro- 

 duction of the locomotive and the steamboat, but no single achieve- 

 ment of theirs, nor all combined, has conferred so great a benefit 

 upon the country and upon the world as did the bequest by which 

 one of those sons, Edwin A. Stevens, founded a technical school, 

 where the youth of the present and of succeeding generations are to 

 be taught the principles upon which is based the profession which he 

 and his father and brothers practiced with such splendid results. 



In St. Paul's Cathedral is a Latin inscription, which informs the 

 visitor that-a memorial is erected to its great architect, Sir Christopher 

 Wren, but that his most appropriate monument is the great cathedral. 



So it is here ; we see no memorial erected to the founder of this 

 first school of mechanical engineering, but " si monumentum quaeris 

 circumspiee." 



The President — I wish again to call attention to the fact, which I 

 stated last week, that Watt had nothing whatever to do with the 

 invention of the American steam-engine, which is the high-pressure 

 engine, an engine producing power by heat, and not by heat and cold. 

 Watt made important -improvements in the condensing steam- 

 pump. The double-acting engine is, however, essentially the double- 

 acting pump, invented by Delahire many years before Watt's time. 

 The governor was an old invention, first applied to regulate a sup- 

 ply of water, and applied by Watt to steam. The indicator was 

 invented by a clerk in the employ of Watt ; the crank and fly-wheel 

 by one who would not allow Watt to use it. Playfair says Watt's 

 greatest invention was " the parallel motion." This we know is very 

 defective, and is not used on American engines. Leopold's high- 

 pressure engine is a myth. He made a drawing of one, which, it is 

 plain to be seen, would not operate. 



The English books are full of accounts of English engineering, with 

 little relating to America ; and yet all the English engineering pro- 

 jects together do not equal those in the State of New York alone. 

 Along the line of the Erie canal, there are greater wonders of engi- 



