and the machinery worked for the pleasure of all
comers; then it was run on a temporary tram-road
laid down on the spot now called Euston-square,
and thrown open to the public as an ordinary
sight of the time. But on the second
day Trevithick, "in one of his usual freaks,"
closed the exhibition, and left hundreds waiting
round the ground in a state of great wrath. The
engine was about the size of an orchestra drum,
and could be attached to a phaeton or other
carriage.

But a more useful triumph over difficulties
was the railway locomotive, which Trevithick
was the first to make; and which was used for
the Merthyr Tydvil Railway in 1804. This
was an engine of an eight-inch cylinder, placed
horizontally, as at present, with a four feet six
inch stroke, and which " drew after it upon the
railroad as many carriages as carried ten tons of
bar iron, from a distance of nine miles, which
it performed without any supply of water to
that contained in the boiler at the time of
setting out, travelling at the rate of five miles
an hour." This was considered a great triumph
at the time; but Trevithick, like all the earlier
locomotive projectors, was retarded and much
troubled by the false idea that smooth wheels on
a smooth rail would have no bite, and that,
when dragging a heavy weight, they would just
slip round and round, and do nothing else.
Consequently, he put sundry rough projections
on his wheels, much on the same plan as
"roughing" a horse-shoe; and even we may well
wonder at the five miles an hour, with ten tons
of bar iron, under all these disadvantages.
Trevithick made another engine for the Wylam
waggon-way, which at first could not be got to
move at all, and, when it did, it flew all to
pieces, as its best exposition of the laws
of motion. Near this Wylam waggon-way
George Stephenson lived, whom all other men's
railway failures and short-comings set thinking
and planning how he could make things
work more easily together. And the result was
an engine "which included the following important
improvements on all previous attempts
— namely, simple and direct communication
between the cylinder and the wheels rolling upon
the rails; joint adhesion of all the wheels
attained by the use of connecting rods; and,
finally, a beautiful method of exciting the
combustion of the fuel by employing the waste
steam, which had formerly been allowed
uselessly to escape into the air."

This was in 1815; but, we have no business
with such a date yet, and must go back to the
time of Trevithick's traction-engine and Lord's
Cricket-ground.

Shortly after the creation of that " chariot of
the De'il," which ran streaming and shrieking
along the road from Camborne to Plymouth,
Trevithick and Vivian took out a patent for the
application of high pressure to steam-engines,
and erected many high-pressure engines in
Wales and elsewhere; which, however, were
of less value than they might have been, owing
to that fallacy of the rougli wheels. For, though
Trevithick was undoubtedly in advance of his age,
and saw the coming of much that neither science
nor society was then prepared to receive; though
he was a man of vast genius and grand ideas;
yet he could not look to everything, and it was
reserved for another and a more practical man to
disencumber the wheels of locomotives, and
take them out of leading-strings. But Trevithick
was very vast, very universal, in his
science. In the Catalogue of the South Kensington
Museum he is described as "inventor
and constructor of the first high-pressure steam-engine,
and of the first steam-carriage used in
England; constructor of a tunnel beneath the
Thames, which he completed to within a hundred
feet of the proposed terminus, and was
then compelled to abandon the undertaking;
inventor and constructor of steam-engines and
machinery for the mines of Peru (capable of
being transported in mountainous districts), by
which he succeeded in restoring the Peruvian
mines to prosperity; also of coining-machinery
for the Peruvian Mint, and of furnaces for purifying
silver ore by fusion; also inventor of
other improvements in steam-engines, impelling-carriages,
hydraulic-engines, propelling and towing
vessels, discharging and stowing ships' cargoes,
floating docks, construction of vessels,
iron buoys, steam-boilers, corking, obtaining
fresh water, heating apartments," &c. Surely
a sufficiently wide range for one mind to travel
over! It was he also who conceived the first idea
of the screw-propeller; for nothing seemed to
come amiss to him, and his science had a kind of
prescient prophetic character only found when
there is genius as well as knowledge.

That tunnelling under the Thames was a
strange affair. It was the second time the
thing had been tried, Ralph Dodd being the
first of the unsuccessful borers. In 1809,
Trevithick raised a large sum by subscription,
and began his work at Rotherhithe. Of course
he kept too near the bottom of the river: his
object in this, being to save both labour and expense;
but he met with no harm until he was
nine hundred and thirty feet under the river,
when he got into a hole at the muddy bottom;
and once, a piece of uncooked beef which had
fallen from one of the ships, drifted into
the works. He stopped the hole and set to
work again, always under greater difficulties,
both pecuniary and engineering, than any
which his successful successor, Brunel, had to
encounter. He made from four to ten feet of
excavation a day, and soon got to a thousand
feet. And now Mr. Hyde Clarke shall tell the
rest:

"On arriving at this distance, according to a previous
arrangement with the committee, Trevithick
was to receive a hundred guineas, which, after the
verification of the work by a surveyor, were paid to
him. According to a contemporary— and the end of
which seems to be in perfect keeping with Trevithick's
character— the surveyor reported to the subscribers
confirming the measurement, but asserting
that the line had been run a foot or so on one side.
This statement, which, if well founded, was not material,