cans began to use steam boats on their rivers, that their safety and utility was first proved. But the merit of constructing these boats is due to natives of Great Britain. Mr. Henry Bell of Glasgow gave the first model of them to the late Mr. Fulton of America, and corresponded regularly with Fulton on the subject. Mr. Bell continued to turn his talents to the improving of steam apparatus, and its application to various manufactures about Glasgow; and in 1811, constructed the Comet steam boat, the first of the kind in Europe, to navigate the Clyde, from Glasgow to Port-Glasgow, Greenock, Helensburgh, and Inverness." (See pages 117 and 118 Parliamentary Report on Steam Navigation.) What will after ages say, when told that all which Mr. Bell received from government, who thus acknowledge his claims, was £200!—and of this sum he expended nearly £100 in sundry expences connected with his journey to London, and for the petitions supporting him from Scotland and England. A glaring neglect is chargeable somewhere. Rulers of our country! You may yet do something in this matter; the worthy widow of the engineer is still amongst us. Fifty pounds a-year from you to her would only be what the city of Glasgow is giving to compensate a little for the losses they both sustained in their country's cause, through steam navigation. These hints are given in no captious spirit, but to do justice to a worthy man. I have before me the London Quarterly Review, vol. 19, for April 1818, in which the life of Robert Fulton, by his friend Cadwallader D. Colden, is reviewed in a rather long article, commencing at page 347. The writer passes over in silence Fulton's obligations to British engineers, and to Henry Bell especially, and claims for his friend the absolute invention and introduction of the system! This is too ridiculous to need serious refutation, a thousand facts prove that Great Britain has the merit of the discovery, and the United States copied the plans from us. Mr. Colden, in a blustering kind of tone, tells us that Fulton could have blown up all the British fleets by his "fiery torpedoes," and thinks it was tender mercy in the Americans to spare the ships of Albion; and that our admirals seemed to be aware of the danger, and to shy contact with Fulton!! Shades of Nelson, Duncan, and Collingwood! I do not admire war, we have had too much of ît, and the nation is suffering from the burden caused by it. Our millions of industrious operatives are on the borders of starvation by it. It is wicked, irrational, and unchristian; but Cadwallader makes even a Quaker to feel something like the war spirit rise in his bosom, at the flippancy of these expressions, and at the general tone of the author, who had better try to put down black slavery in his own country, than write about what the Americans could do with their steam ships to crush Britain. I hope England and America know their interests better, than to bring this sublime invention into use to destroy each other. The London Reviewer, however, has not spared Fulton's injudicious friend for these faults, while, at the same time, he ac knowledges the merit of some parts of the work as a literary production. The life of Fulton was written in 1817, and two quotations may not perhaps be out of place here,-one poetical, the other prose. "Livingston and Fulton, dear to fame; the patron and inventer of steam boats, are no more! but their names shall be engraven on a monument, sacred to the benefactors of mankind." The generations yet unborn shall read,— —taught seamen to interrogate With steady gaze, tho' tempest-toss'd, the sun, In triumph proud, through the loud sounding surge." "This invention," adds Mr. Colden, "is spreading fast through the civilised world, and though excluded yet from Russia, will ere long be extended to that vast empire. A bird hatched on the Hudson, will soon people the floods on the Volga, and cygnets descended from an American swan glide along the surface of the Caspian sea. Then the hoary genius of Asia, high throned on the peaks of Caucasus, his moist eye glistening while it glances over the ruins of Babylon, Persepolis, Jerusalem, and Palmyra,-shall bow with grateful reverence to the inventive spirit of this western world!" In these pages of the biographer of Fulton, there is much to praise as well as much to censure; and as the American government, to their honour, warmly patronised the builder of their first practical steamer, while our more meritorious Henry Bell was neglected by the British rulers, we may make some allowance for the exulting tone and high colouring of this transatlantic author. cannot account, however, for the ignorance which is displayed in the British Reviews, as to the merits of the man to whom England is under the deepest obligations for the glorious system, whose first triumphs Glasgow witnessed on that river, where the steam I |