Oct, 24, 1872] 



NATURE 



5" 



been a cause of complaint all along is one of the many 

 lessons to be learned from Trevithick's life ; and so will 

 it ever be, until the simple but stupendous and widely 

 beneficent principle which the man of science, by reve- 

 rent asking, has obtained from the liberal hand of Nature, 

 is not only more thoroughly understood and more scien- 

 tifically applied by those who undertake to put it to the 

 uses of humanity ; but until Science holds supreme sway 

 over all the actions and thoughts of men universally, until 

 she holds the same place as a guiding principle for the 

 lives of men, and their relationships to each other and to 

 the surrounding universe, that superstition and wild imagi- 

 nation have held for ages. It will only be when education 

 is founded upon a thoroughly scientific groundwork, when 

 men are trained from their youth upwards to regard 

 human and extra-human phenomena with the clear, bold, 

 intelligent vision of science undimmed by superstition, 

 unwarped by prejudice, and unshortened by selfishness, 

 that the full significance of scientific discoveries will ever 

 be realised. Only then will they have a chance of making 

 unobstructed way in conferring upon mankind the innu- 

 merable benefits with which many of them are fraught, 

 and in raising the race higher and higher in the scale 

 of civilisation, till that golden age be realised which 

 poets dream of as in the unknown past, but which 

 assuredly lies in the certain though, it may be, far distant 

 future. 



These remarks are suggested by the "Life of Trevithick," 

 which, read in the light of the present day, makes one 

 feel somewhat sad, and certainly sorry for the great and 

 unselfish mechanical genius who scattered his inventions 

 broadcast among his fellows, to the great enrichment of 

 the latter, while he himself led a chequered and almost 

 homeless life, dying, at last, penniless among strangers. 

 Trevithick himself was not a scientific man, and seems to 

 have had only a vague notion of the scientific principles 

 upon which his numerous applications of the expan- 

 sive power of steam were founded. But he was 

 not like many so-called "practical" men, who work 

 only by rule of thumb, and profess contempt for the 

 scientific principles which they put to practical use. 

 Trevithick appears to have hid the greatest respect for 

 science, and invariably submitted a new invention, or 

 application of the one simple principle which governed all 

 his inventions, to his scientific friend Mr. Giddy (after- 

 wards Gilbert, and President of the Royal Society), in 

 order that they might be submitted to the rigid test of scien- 

 tific theory. Had a similar course been followed at a much 

 earlier period, and had the earlier manipulators of steam 

 been animated by the same spirit as well as the enthusiasm, 

 and penetration, and disinterestedness of Trevithick, the 

 steam-engine, instead of remaining the clumsy and unpli- 

 able machine it did for so many years, might about a cen- 

 tury and a half ago have reached the perfection and wide 

 applicability it has attained at the present day. And it 

 was only in proportion as mechanicians clearly realised 

 for themselves the full significance of the simple laws of 

 steam, and fearlessly allowed them, under judicious control, 

 to work with a powerful purpose upon properly constructed 

 machinery, that anything like the wide-spread benefit was 

 derived from them that they were calculated to confer ; in 

 other words, it has only been in proportion as engineers 

 have grounded the rules of their art upon scientific prin- 



ciples that the steam-engine has attained to its present 

 comparative perfection and innumerable labour-lessening 

 and therefore blessed uses. In this it is that the great 

 merit of Watt and Tevithick lies, both of whom had the 

 penetrative genius to perceive that the mighty power which 

 lies latent in a cup of water was almost entirely frittered 

 away for want of proper guidance and a suitable channel 

 wherein to work ; and within a very few years after these 

 men had made their important inventions, the develop- 

 ment of the steam-engine had made infinitely more rapid 

 progress than it had done during a previous century, 



The history of the apphcation of steam to machinery, 

 the gradual development of the steam-engine, and 

 especially its use for locomotive purposes, must be known 

 to all our readers, and therefore we shall not attempt to 

 repeat the oft-told story. It is one of those " fairy tales 

 of science," which are more wonderful and often more 

 bewitchingly beautiful than any of the thousand myths 

 by which our " rude fore;athers " blindly but naturally 

 attempted to explain the many mysteries of the universe ; 

 and they have the additional merit of being true 

 and therefore undying and never leading to disappoint- 

 ment and distrust. Nor shall we attempt to adjust the 

 relative claims of Watt and Trevithick to priority of 

 invention, or try to show their respective shares in the dis- 

 covery from which the world is now reaping so much benefit. 

 It is humiliating to think that Watt and Trevithick lived 

 for a considerable time only a few doors from each other 

 in a small Cornish town, each bent upon accomplishing a 

 beneficent and highly useful purpose, and yet never spoke 

 to each other, but on the contrary regarded each other 

 with considerable bitterness all their lives ; and this 

 simply because the one advocated high pressure while the 

 other was pushing the adoption of low pressure engines. 

 Mr. Francis Trevithick, naturally enough no doubt, but 

 with very bad taste and we believe much injustice, speaks 

 of Watt frequently with great bittterness and depreciation 

 as his father's rival, and jealous and ill-speaking opponent. 

 To revive these squabbles serves no good purpose, but 

 merely gives occasion to the world which lies in ignorance to 

 sneer ; the merit of Watt was very great, and so was that 

 of Trevithick, and there is no need whatever to exalt the 

 one at the expense of the other ; each has a lofty and 

 enduring pedestal of his own. We also think it displays 

 considerable want of rellection and of the philosophic 

 spirit to tirade, as Mr. F. Trevithick does, against the in- 

 gratitude of mankind towards those men who have con- 

 ferred upon them great benefits in the shape of useful in- 

 ventions, and against the deafness of men in place and power 

 towards their claims for assistance and reward. The fact 

 is that all great inventors, like all men of supreme 

 penetration and foresight, are often too far in advance of 

 their own generation to meet with much sympathy and 

 appreciation from it. Mankind are not to be swcepingly 

 blamed for this on any score. The race is yet a long 

 way off perfection ; and if the world ran so close on the 

 heels of its great men as to be able at once to com- 

 prehend and appreciate them, these men wovdd not be so 

 great after all. The world, on the whole, acts very 

 honestly, however hardly, to her man of genius, and 

 when she does reach his standpoint, she erects a 

 monument to him if he be dead, or if happily he be still 

 alive, she rewards him with a pension. That Trevithick 



