power is made to unwind the warp, throw the shuttle, drive home the weft, and wind up the woven cloth in the whole at once. These gigantic weavers stand in need of very little assistance from man; he, or rather she, does nothing but mend a broken thread, remove an empty shuttle, put a full one in its place, and attend to a few other trifling duties. Steam is weaving hundreds of millions of yards of cotton cloth every year in the factories of Lancashire and Lanarkshire, at a cost with which manual labour never could compete. It enables Britain to buy the raw cotton of countries four or six thousand miles distant, pay for bringing it from the interior of a continent and across a wide ocean, and then send it back in the shape of cotton cloth to dress the planter who sold and the negro who gathered it. But this cloth serves higher purposes. In the shape of printed handkerchiefs, and other cotton stuffs, it finds its way among savages, where the white man can scarcely venture, and may not unfrequently become the first step in the civilisation of a barbarous tribe.

But the despised discovery of Watt has produced a harvest of other most important results in the arts and manufactures. Every workshop in the country, every river in the civilised world, every sea and ocean is crowded with monuments to his greatness and genius. There is not a large town in Britain but owes much of its population and importance to that wonderful man; and there are few places in Europe where his steam-engine has not developed the wealth of nations, or helped on the march of improvement. The steam-engine, indeed, has been apprenticed to almost every trade-a printer, a spinner, a weaver,

a horse, a wire-drawer, a blockmaker, a water-carrier, a needlemaker, a bellows-blower, a baker, a screwmaker, a smith, a "jack of all trades," a universal genius, in short. There are few things in manufactures that the steam-engine has not done; there seems nothing in human art that it is incapable of doing. Though only ninety years old, reckoning from the rise of Watt's improvement, it has driven men, horses, and machines out of the field, doing their work with a rapidity and accuracy to which they never attained.

Iron is the second main source of Britain's greatness that we mentioned: to what an innumerable variety of purposes has it been put, and what perfect command has been attained over it within the past century! In one form it appears as cast-iron, from which rods, stands, discs, wheels, screws, presses, cylinders, pillars for supporting roofs, beams for flooring and bridges, with an immense number of useful and ornamental articles, are made. -Castiron, again, with some labour is changed into wroughtiron; a blow of a hammer has broken in pieces a cannon made of the former-chains of the latter have been known to stretch under enormous loads, like india-rubber. From wrought-iron are manufactured ships, rails, roofs, bridges, and a host of articles. This kind of iron is turned into steel, from which knives, swords, razors, needles, and an endless variety of articles, are made. The perfect command which has been attained over iron is not less remarkable than the multitude of uses to which it has been applied. It is made to plane iron as smooth as it planes wood, tearing off shavings from the metal to precisely the same depth with an accuracy unattainable by manual la