engine are those of Newcomen, Watt, and Stephenson; the first a
blacksmith, the second a maker of mathematical instruments, and the
third an engine-fireman. Huntingdon the preacher was originally a
coalheaver, and Bewick, the father of wood-engraving, a coalminer.
Dodsley was a footman, and Holcroft a groom. Baffin the navigator
began his seafaring career as a man before the mast, and Sir
Cloudesley Shovel as a cabin-boy. Herschel played the oboe in a
military band. Chantrey was a journeyman carver, Etty a journeyman
printer, and Sir Thomas Lawrence the son of a tavern-keeper.
Michael Faraday, the son of a blacksmith, was in early life
apprenticed to a bookbinder, and worked at that trade until he
reached his twenty-second year: he now occupies the very first
rank as a philosopher, excelling even his master, Sir Humphry Davy,
in the art of lucidly expounding the most difficult and abstruse
points in natural science.

Among those who have given the greatest impulse to the sublime
science of astronomy, we find Copernicus, the son of a Polish
baker; Kepler, the son of a German public-house keeper, and himself
the "garcon de cabaret;" d'Alembert, a foundling picked up one
winter's night on the steps of the church of St. Jean le Rond at
Paris, and brought up by the wife of a glazier; and Newton and
Laplace, the one the son of a small freeholder near Grantham, the
other the son of a poor peasant of Beaumont-en-Auge, near Honfleur.
Notwithstanding their comparatively adverse circumstances in early
life, these distinguished men achieved a solid and enduring
reputation by the exercise of their genius, which all the wealth in
the world could not have purchased. The very possession of wealth
might indeed have proved an obstacle greater even than the humble
means to which they were born. The father of Lagrange, the