-driving machinery, impelling ships, grinding corn, printing books,
stamping money, hammering, planing, and turning iron; in short, of
performing every description of mechanical labour where power is
required. One of the most useful modifications in the engine was
that devised by Trevithick, and eventually perfected by George
Stephenson and his son, in the form of the railway locomotive, by
which social changes of immense importance have been brought about,
of even greater consequence, considered in their results on human
progress and civilization, than the condensing-engine of Watt.

One of the first grand results of Watt's invention,--which placed
an almost unlimited power at the command of the producing classes,-
-was the establishment of the cotton-manufacture. The person most
closely identified with the foundation of this great branch of
industry was unquestionably Sir Richard Arkwright, whose practical
energy and sagacity were perhaps even more remarkable than his
mechanical inventiveness. His originality as an inventor has
indeed been called in question, like that of Watt and Stephenson.
Arkwright probably stood in the same relation to the spinning-
machine that Watt did to the steam-engine and Stephenson to the
locomotive. He gathered together the scattered threads of
ingenuity which already existed, and wove them, after his own
design, into a new and original fabric. Though Lewis Paul, of
Birmingham, patented the invention of spinning by rollers thirty
years before Arkwright, the machines constructed by him were so
imperfect in their details, that they could not be profitably
worked, and the invention was practically a failure. Another
obscure mechanic, a reed-maker of Leigh, named Thomas Highs, is
also said to have invented the water-frame and spinning-jenny; but
they, too, proved unsuccessful.