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It is nothing very uncommon even for a two-hundred-acre farmer in England to have a small stationary or locomotive steam-engine, and to find plenty of work for it, too, in threshing his grain, grinding his fodder, pulping his roots, cutting his hay and straw, and for other purposes. Mr. Mechi would doubtless have one for these objects alone.
The delicate and complex machinery needed in operations of such hairbreadth nicety as his enterprise involved, the steam-engine which was to set it in motion, at times the very crucibles in which his specula were cast, issued from his own workshops.
Coal, water, and a little oil, are all that the steam-engine, with its bowels of iron and heart of fire, needs to enable it to go on working night and day, without rest or sleep.
The steam-engine may go over its appointed task, day after day, the whole year round, and yet, at the end of the year, it will have no more tendency to go than before its first trip. Not so the boy. Going begets going. By doing a thing often, he acquires a facility, an inclination, a tendency, a habit of doing it.
It intersected all the lodes we were working, and I constructed a tramway up it as far as the most northern mine, called San Benito, by which we brought down the ore to the stamps and the firewood for the steam-engine, and in a short time we had cleared all the timber from the lower part of the valley; and a dense scrub or second growth sprang up, through which numerous paths were made by the woodcutters.
I have, however, for some time past been thoroughly satisfied that this fear was needless; as I am satisfied that a well-made gas-engine is as durable as a steam-engine, and the parts subject to wear can be replaced at moderate cost.
A cloth held aloft aided his progress down or across the wind, and it became an integral element of the sailing craft, which evolved through the stages of the galley and caravel to the schooner and frigate of modern times. When the steam-engine was invented and incorporated in the boat, a new line of evolution was initiated, leading from the "Clermont" to the "Lusitania" and the battleship.
"Every steam-engine wanted for boats on the Lake, for mills and factories near the Lake, and on and near the canal should be made at this point. "Not a pound of nails, a wagon-tire, an anchor, a cable, a cast-iron stove, pot, kettle, ploughshare, or any article made of cast-iron a yard of coarse cotton, a gallon of beer, an ax, a shovel, nor a spade, should be sent east for.
It either produces discontented savages like myself or goes too far and turns the whole body into brain. I have managed to get a sort of steam-engine into my head which gives me little rest and would wear out my body if I didn't happen to have the constitution of a buffalo. But I doubt if I shall be what North is, sixteen years hence. That man is the best example of equilibrium I have ever seen.
In the collection belonging to the University of Glasgow there was a little model of a steam-engine by Newcomen that had never worked well. The professor of physics, Anderson, desired Watt to repair it. In the hands of this powerful workman the defects of its construction disappeared; from that time the apparatus was made to work annually under the inspection of the astonished students.
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