disinterested to be credible. The termination of the investigation resulted in his complete and honorable acquittal, but the venomed shaft rankled in his kind and gentle breast to the hour of his death. It is no consolation to his numerous friends and relatives to know, that all who joined in this base conspiracy against this pure-minded and well-principled man have since paid the forfeit of their infuriated zeal, by the silent, but withering contempt of their fellow-citizens,

In 1831, he built a sloop-of-war for the Sultan Mahmoud, and was induced to visit Turkey. His fame as a skilful architect had preceded him, and he was shortly afterwards offered the situation of chief naval constructor for the empire. A field worthy of his enterprise seemed open to him. With his characteristic energy he commenced the organization of the navy yard, and laid down the keel of a ship of the line. He had rapidly entered in her construction, and had so far advanced in the favor of the sultan that preparations were in train to create him a Bey of the empire, when his labors were suddenly brought to a close by his lamented death, from inflammation of the bowels, which occurred November 12, 1832, in the fifty-seventh year of his age.

In private life, Eckford was remarkably simple in his manners and habits. Abstemious and temperate, he always possessed unclouded faculties; and his quiet attention and kindness to all under his control enabled him to secure their ready co-operation in any of his plans which required from them willing and prompt exertions. The scrupulous observance of his contracts to the minutest particular was with him a point of honor; and his dealings with his fellow-men bore rather the character of princely munificence than the generosity of a private individual. Throughout life, and amid transactions involving millions, he maintained the same unassuming habits, considering himself but the mere trustee for the benefit of others; and died as he had lived, honored and beloved by all who knew him.

FOREIGN MECHANICS.

JOHN SMEATON.

JOHN SMEATON was born the 28th of May, 1724, at Austhorpe, near Leeds. The strength of his understanding and the originality of his genius appeared at an early age. His playthings, it is said by one long well acquainted with him, were not the playthings of children, but the tools men work with, and he appeared to derive more pleasure from seeing the men in the neighborhood work, and asking them questions, than from any thing else. When not quite six years old, he was seen one day, much to the alarm of his friends, on the top of his father's barn, fixing up some. thing like a windmill. Not long after he attended some men fixing a pump at a neighboring village, and observing them cut off a piece of bored pipe, he was so lucky as to procure it, and actually made with it a working pump that raised water. In his fourteenth and fifteenth years, he made for himself an engine to turn rose-work, and presented his friends with boxes turned in ivory or wood. At the age of eighteen he had acquired by the strength of his genius and indefatigable industry, an extensive set of tools, and the art of working in most of the mechanical trades, without the assistance of any master, and this with an expertness seldom surpassed.

His father was an attorney, and intended to bring up his son to his own profession; but the latter finding, to use his own words, "that the law did not suit the bent of his genius," obtained his parent's consent that he should seek a more congenial employment. Accordingly he came to London, where he established himself as a mathematical instrument maker, and soon became known to the scientific circles by several ingenious inventions; among which were a new kind of magnetic compass, and a machine for measuring a ship's way at sea.

In 1753, he was elected a member of the Royal Society, and contributed several papers to their philosophical transactions. In the succeeding year he visited Holland, travelling mostly on foot

and in passage-boats, to make himself master, with greater ease, of the mechanical contrivances of those countries. A few years after his return he was applied to, to rebuild the Eddystone lighthouse, a structure which has rendered his name so celebrated. To more fully illustrate the difficulties he had to surmount, we give in connection a brief history of the lighthouse.

Eddystone lighthouse is erected on one of the rocks of that name, which lie in the English Channel about fourteen miles S.S.W. from Plymouth. The nearest land to the Eddystone rocks is the point to the west of Plymouth called the Ram Head, from which they are about ten miles almost directly south. As these rocks (called the Eddystone, in all probability, from the whirl or eddy which is occasioned by the waters striking against them) were not very much elevated above the sea at any time, and at high water were quite covered by it, they formed a most dangerous obstacle to navigation, and several vessels were every season lost upon them. Many a gallant ship which had voyaged in safety across the whole breadth of the Atlantic, was shattered to pieces on this hidden source of destruction as it was nearing port, and went down with its crew in sight of their native shores. It was therefore very desirable that the spot should, if possible, be pointed out by a warning light. But the same circumstances which made the Eddystone rocks so formidable to the mariner, rendered the attempt to erect a lighthouse upon them a peculiarly difficult enterprise. The task, however, was at last undertaken by a Mr. Henry Winstanley, of Littlebury in Essex, a gentleman of some property, and not a reg. ularly-bred engineer or architect, but only a person with a natural turn for mechanical invention, and fond of amusing himself with ingenius experiments, and withal was somewhat of an excentric character. In his house at Littlebury, a visiter would enter a room where he saw an old slipper on the floor; he would kick away the slipper, and a figure with the appearance of a being from the other world would start up before him. He would sit down in a chair, and immediately a pair of arms would clasp him around the waist. He would go into an arbor in the garden, by the side of a canal, and straightway he would find himself afloat in the middle of that piece of water, without the power of getting ashore, until a person in the secret had moved certain machinery. Mr. Winstanley also contrived some ingenious water-works.

The fabric erected by this amateur engineer, upon the Eddystone, was of timber, sixty feet high, and was four years in building; during which time the workmen suffered much from bad weather, and were once or twice taken off in a state of starvation, after having been for weeks debarred all intercourse with the land.