1784-1820.]

TRAVELLERS-TWO GREAT INVENTIONS.

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of our era. Now the law prescribes that every child born in the kingdom must be vaccinated. We look back upon the time when many who had escaped with life from the terrible disease that killed ninety-two in every thousand of the population, bore into our public places the indelible marks of the scourge, and we rejoice now to behold the unscarred faces of the young as the best tribute to the memory of Edward Jenner.

With the striking exception of Mungo Park, no remarkable traveller had gone forth from England to enlarge the bounds of geographical discovery during the period of the war. Henry Martyn, Claudius Buchanan, and other zealous men were then missionaries in India, and prepared the way for the noble labours of the second Bishop of Calcutta, Reginald Heber. In 1820 the observations of Captain Parry in the Polar Seas led to a government expedition for exploring the Arctic Circle, in the expectation of discovering the North-West Passage. These undertakings belong to a chapter which we must devote to the Science of a period nearer the present time, when the vast results of the connection between Philosophy and the Industrial Arts may be briefly traced.

It may be desirable, however, here to mention two great mechanical inventions that have had the most decided influence on the progress of society. About the first decade of the Nineteenth Century, there was a real beginning in Great Britain of that mode of navigation which was destined to make distant countries less remote, and to change the whole system of communication in our own waters. Henry Bell had his Steam passage-boat running on the Clyde in 1811. In a few years steam-boats were plying on the Thames. In 1816 there were persons who had the hardihood to make a voyage in such a smoke-puffing vessel even as far as Margate. In 1818 Jeffrey thus described a steam-boat on Loch Lomond, which surprised him as he was sitting with his wife in a lonely wild little bay; "It is a new experiment for the temptation of tourists. It

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THE STEAM BOAT-THE PRINTING MACHINE.

[1784-1820. circumnavigates the whole lake every day in about ten hours; and it was certainly very strange and striking to hear and see it hissing and roaring past the headlands of our little bay, foaming and spouting like an angry whale; but, on the whole, I think it rather vulgarises the scene too much,' and I am glad that it is found not to answer, and is to be dropped next year."* Vast as have been the results of the application of Steam to Navigation, we may almost venture to say that the application of Steam to Printing cannot be regarded as a less important instrument in the advance of civilization. The Printing Machine has had as great an influence upon the spread of knowledge in the Nineteenth Century, as the invention of printing itself in the fifteenth century. The first sheet of paper printed by cylinders and by steam, was the Times' newspaper of the 28th of November, 1814. The maker of that Printing Machine was Mr. Koenig, a native of Saxony. Machines, less cumbrous and more adapted to all the purposes of the typographical art, gradually came into use. Without this invention the most popular daily paper could only produce, with the most intense exertion, five thousand copies for the demand between sunrise and sunset. Sixty thousand copies of a London morning paper can now be distributed through the country in two or three hours after the first sheet has been rolled. These astonishing changes in the powers of Journalism are not more important than the effects upon all Literature, in the reduction of the price of books by this invention of the Printing Machine and the concurrent invention of the Paper Machine.

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF BRITISH WRITERS.

In the Fifth Volume of the Popular History of England a Table is given of the principal British Writers in each century, from the beginning of the sixth century to the end of the eighteenth. Added to the name of each author are given the dates of his or her birth and death, as far as could be ascertained, and, in some cases, the title of the work by which the writer is best known. The names are arranged in three columns-Imagination,—which includes the Poets and Novelists; Fact,-writers on History, Geography, and other matters of exact detail; Speculative and Scientific,—those who treat of Philosophy and Science. This division is, to a certain extent, useful; but it is difficult to carry it out with precision, especially in cases where the writings of one author belong to several classes of literature. The subjoined Table is a continuation of that in Volume V., comprising the principal writers of the present century, with the exception of those who are now living (December 18, 1861). These will remain to be added in a Supplementary Table.

1800 Henry Kirke White, 1785- 1800 Mungo Park, 1771-1805, 1800 Henry Cavendish, 1731

A.D.

1800 Thomas Rickman, 17761841, Gothic Architec