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son of Matthew Boulton of Soho.

The following is the prize composition, with some slight variations since made by its author:

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The sense of which may be rendered,-though its elegance is not equalled,—by this English translation:—

"Above all nations, great and free
"Britannia, lov'd of Heaven!
"What mighty blessings hath to thee
"The march of Science given !

"Let Greece not boast her Dædalus,
"Nor Araby her horses:-
"A higher wit invents for us
"Machines of swifter courses.

"Its iron way athwart the plain

"O'er brooks and rivers steering,

"Through mountains piercing, and again

"From tunnell'd gorge appearing,

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CHINE-ARTICULATED WATER-PIPE — - MACHINE FOR COPYING SCULPTURE ITS GRADUAL PROGRESS, AND ITS PERFORMANCES -DATES AND EXTRACTS FROM MSS. CONCERNING IT INTENDED SPECIFICATION OF A PATENT FOR ITS INVENTION RELATIVE DRAWINGS TIME EMPLOYED IN ITS OPERATIONS - PERFECTION OF THE WORK DONE LATER PROCESSES OF A SIMILAR KIND.

By another of what may be called his mechanical recreations, practised soon after the date of the last of his steam-engine patents, Mr. Watt seems to have realised the idea, made classical by the story of Aladdin, of "New lamps for old." His letters to Mr. Argand, famed for manufactures of that sort, contain various ingenious suggestions on the subject of better reading-lamps than had before existed; and for a long time lamps were made at Soho on Mr. Watt's principles, which gave a light surpassing both in steadiness and brilliance anything of the kind that had appeared in those comparatively dark ages; and which, indeed, we have seldom, if ever, seen equalled by the elaborate contrivances so much vaunted in our own days of more general illumination.

In 1788, he made a pretty instrument for determining the specific gravities of liquids; having, he says, improved on a hint he had taken. "It consists of a syphon of "two equal legs, with a tube joined to the bend of it, "and a little water in that tube. One leg being im"mersed in water, and the other in the liquid to be examined, by sucking at the pipe the liquors will both rise to columns proportioned to their specific "gravities; and, if it is about 13 inches long in the legs,

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you can easily judge within 46 part of the specific gravity, "or, rather, of the longest column suspended.” *

So late as 1856 we have read the following announcement from St. Petersburg, showing that Mr. Watt's method is not without its followers even in the present era of more exact science: A very simple contrivance has been arranged by "A. Meyer, for measuring the specific gravity of solid and "fluid bodies. It consists of a glass cylinder, (I presume, a precipitating glass), a glass tube in the form of a syphon, "and a brass screw vice for holding the syphon."†

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Little more than a year after the date of the specificgravity machine, he says that he had "found out a method "of making tubes of the elastic resin, without dissolving it,” which recipe he offered to give to his friend the Chevalier Landriani. We have not found this method described in any subsequent letter of Mr. Watt, of which a copy has been preserved; but the subject of it was one which excited considerable interest at that time, and the importance of such tubes for a thousand purposes in science and the arts, is now universally understood. Winch and Cavallo's mode of dissolving caoutchouc in sulphuric æther, and forming tubes by dipping cylindrical clay moulds into the viscous solution, as described in works of that date, received great attention from chemists both in this country and on the Continent, as supplying a great desideratum in the apparatus of the laboratory.‡

The arithmetical machine, on which Mr. Watt says, in 1785, that he had been turning "some of his idle thoughts," he does not appear ever to have prosecuted further than by considering the manner in which he could make it perform the processes of multiplication and division: processes which may be held to imply the earlier steps of addition and subtraction. But in a mind such as his, this may safely be presumed to have been already no inconsiderable stage of advancement towards the completion of such a

*To Dr. Black, June 8th, 1788. + The Times,' 8th March, 1856. See the 'Travels of St. Fond,' vol. i. pp. 28-34.

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machine. He calls the arrangement of it, as so provided for in his own view, "exceedingly simple;" but speaks modestly of "making an attempt at making it," and of it being only an attempt, from his experience of the difficulties which in mechanics intervene "between the cup and the mouth." Of the wisdom of this caution no one, probably, has been made more fully aware than that ingenious mathematician and machinist of our own time, who, at great pecuniary cost, and with still greater expenditure of ingenious thought and unwearied application, succeeded in producing a machine which realised even more than Mr. Watt's early announcement contemplated. "I have been turning some of my idle thoughts "lately upon an arithmetical machine; how I shall succeed "I know not, not having made it yet. Its properties are to "be, that when you want to multiply, you first turn up one figure of the multiplier, you then turn up in their order all "the figures of the multiplicand, and the machine will show "the product by that multiplier; you then turn up the "second figure of the multiplier, and, beginning one place "towards the left hand, you turn up again all the figures of "the multiplicand, and the machine shows the product by "these two figures ready added, and so on for any number of

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figures; and it will perform division nearly as easily, with"out the least calculation or burthen to the memory, other "than to take the figures in their order, beginning at either "end you like. I intend to make an attempt at making it ;— "I say an attempt, for though the machine is exceedingly simple, yet I have learnt by experience that in mechanics many things fall out between the cup and the mouth."†

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Another of his contrivances, happy in its conception, and less difficult of completion than the arithmetical machine would of necessity have been, belongs to the early part of the present century. He was about that time consulted by the company of proprietors of the Glasgow Waterworks, as to a

It is scarcely necessary for us to do more than allude to the name of Mr. Babbage; the success of whose difficult pursuits has been so honourable, not only to himself, but also to

the mechanical skill of this country, already most highly distinguished in: the line of his predilection.

Mr. Watt to Mr. De Luc, 11th December, 1785.

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