fected that it can be set up and supplied with fuel at small cost, it will combine all desirable qualities, and will afford to the industrial arts a range the extent of which can scarcely be predicted. It is not merely that a powerful and convenient motor that can be procured and carried anywhere is substituted for the motors already in use, but that it causes rapid extension in the arts in which it is applied, and can even create entirely new arts.
The most signal service that the steam-engine has rendered to England is undoubtedly the revival of the working of the coal-mines, which had declined, and threatened to cease entirely, in consequence of the continually increasing difficulty of drainage, and of raising the coal.[1] We should rank second the benefit to iron manufacture, both by the abundant supply of coal substituted for wood just when the latter had begun to grow scarce,
- ↑ It may be said that coal-mining has increased tenfold in England since the invention of the steam-engine. It is almost equally true in regard to the mining of copper, tin, and iron. The results produced in a half-century by the steam-engine in the mines of England are to-day paralleled in the gold and silver mines of the New World—mines of which the working declined from day to day, principally on account of the insufficiency of the motors employed in the draining and the extraction of the minerals.
