and distress of his situation, his appeared to grow more elastic as trouble increased.

In the year 1655, Worcester wrote his famous Century (hundred) of Inventions. This work contained but little more than a mere definition of what the inventions were destined to perform. His object in committing them to writing appears to have been for the purpose of reference, when he should be in a situation to carry them out; hence the descriptions, although well enough for his own purpose, are in general too indefinite for comprehension. The novelty of the greater number of the hundred propositions or descriptions of which this volume consists, and the wonderful nature of others, cast an air of improbability over the whole: the author was charged with describing many things which he wished were invented, rather than machines which he had actually constructed. But these charges are scarcely worth noticing, as they are brought by literary men, who from their pursuits are incapable of judging of the feasibility of mechanical projects. Yet this collection of descriptions bears internal marks of being in many cases what it professes, drawn up from actual trials of machines in existence. On an attentive examination of the general scope of his inventions, the greater number will appear to have been suggested by the wants of his accidental situation, and a small portion by those of his station. To a statesman employed in highly confidential negotia. tions, the secrecy of his correspondence would be of the greatest importance, to a traveller the security of his locks,—a soldier is mainly interested in his arms, at times in scaling a fortification, or transmitting intelligence in the dark, and the projector of a water company could not fail of laying his ingenuity under contribution in devising a mode of raising water above its own level. These classes comprises the greater part of his inventions, and if he did not carry them all into execution, it does not seem to have been so much his fault, as that of the age in which he lived; but the doubt is greatly lessened by considering his perseverance and his means. For thirty-five years he employed an ingenious mechanic under his own eye, whose time was doubtless spent on the inventions described in the Century. In the machine for raising water by steam, it would be almost impossible to describe effects so clearly as he has done, without actually looking at a machine in operation. His description (although very obscure) is contained in the sixtyeighth proposition, in connection with the ninty-ninth and one hun dredth of the "Century," and evidently proves that to him belongs the honor of inventing the first steam engine.

A few years before his death he succeeded in procuring an act of parliament to be passed enabling himself and heirs, for ninety

years thereafter, to receive the sole benefit, profit, and advantage resulting from the use of this machine. But this was of little avail, for like men of a similar genius in more humble life, he was oppressed by poverty and want of encouragement; and the desire of being useful to his country in the way which his experience pointed out as of all others the most effective, gained strength as his offers of service were rejected. Although at every period of life he seems to have been deeply impressed with the feeling that progress was never made in any thing by supine wishes and dilatory efforts, unremitting perseverance were in his case to be of no use in stemming the tide of adverse fortune. His wishes were written in sand; and in the prosecution of philanthropic projects, he was fated not only to experience the neglect of the public, but the ingratitude of friends, without being convinced of the hopelessness of the attempt at introducing improvements beyond the comprehension and spirit of the age. As long as hope survived, and that ceased not until he "was summoned by the angel of death," he continued to prefer with vigor his claims to public attention and patronage.

Worcester died in poverty, on the 4th of April, 1667.

After

his death, his wife, in endeavoring to introduce the "water commanding (steam) engine" into general use, not only lay under the imputation of " insanity" for thus persisting in carrying it forward, but was expostulated with by a Romish priest as being "instigated by the devil!"

From a manuscript volume containing the travels of Cosmo de Medicis, grand duke of Tuscany, first printed in 1818, it appears that about thirty years after the death of Worcester, he actually saw his steam engine in use pumping up water in London.

JAMES FERGUSON.

AMONG self-educated men, there are few who claim more of our admiration than the celebrated JAMES FERGUSON. If ever any one was literally his own instructor in the very elements of knowledge, it was he. Acquisitions that have scarcely in any other case, and probably never by one so young, been made without the assistance either of books or a living teacher, were the discoveries of his solitary and almost illiterate boyhood. There are few more interesting narratives in any language than the account

which Ferguson himself has given of his early history. He was born in the year 1710, a few miles from the village of Keith, in Banffshire; his parents, as he tells us, being in the humblest condition of life, (for his father was merely a day-laborer,) but religious and honest. It was his father's practice to teach his children himself to read and write, as they successively reached what he deemed the proper age; but James was too impatient to wait till his regular turn came. While his father was teaching one of his elder brothers, James was secretly occupied in listening to what was going on; and, as soon as he was left alone, used to get hold of the book, and work hard in endeavoring to master the lesson which he had thus heard gone over. Being ashamed, as he says, to let his father know what he was about, he was wont to apply to an old woman who lived in a neighboring cottage to solve his difficulties. In this way he actually learned to read tolerably well before his father had any suspicion that he knew his letters. His father at last, very much to his surprise, detected him one day reading by himself, and thus found out his secret.

When he was about seven or eight years of age, a simple incident occurred which seems to have given his mind its first bias to what became afterwards its favorite kind of pursuit—viz. mechanics. The roof of the cottage having partly fallen in, his father, in order to raise it again, applied to it a beam, resting on a prop in the manner of a lever, and was thus enabled, with comparative ease, to produce what seemed to his son quite a stupendous effect. The circumstance set our young philosopher thinking; and after a while it struck him that his father, in using the beam, had applied his strength to its extremity, and this, he immediately concluded, was probably an important circumstance in the matter. He proceeded to verify his notion by experiment; and having made several levers, which he called bars, soon not only found that he was right in his conjecture as to the importance of applying the moving force at the point most distant from the fulcrum, but discovered the rule or law of the machine, namely, that the effect of any form or weight made to bear upon it is always exactly proportioned to the distance of the point on which it rests from the fulcrum. "I then," says he, "thought that it was a great pity that, by means of this bar, a weight could be raised but a very little way. On this I soon imagined that, by pulling round a wheel, the weight might be raised to any height, by tying a rope to the weight, and winding the rope round the axle of the wheel, and that the power gained must be just as great as the wheel was broader than the axle was thick; and found it to be exactly so, by hanging one weight to a rope put round the wheel, and ano