There was one quality in Mr. Watt which most honorably distinguished him from too many inventors, and was worthy of all imitation; he was not only entirely free from jealousy, but he exercised a careful and scrupulous self-denial, and was anxious not to appear, even by accident, as appropriating to himself that which he thought belonged in part to others. I have heard him refuse the honor universally ascribed to him, of being inventor of the steam-engine, and call himself simply its improver; though, in my mind, to doubt his right to that honor would be as inaccurate as to question Sir Isaac Newton's claim to his greatest discoveries, because Descartes in mathematics, and Galileo in astronomy and mechanics, had preceded him; or to deny the merits of his illustrious successor, because galvanism was not his discovery, though before his time it had remained as useless to science as the instrument called a steam-engine was to the arts before Mr. Watt. The only jealousy I have known him betray was with respect to others, in the nice adjustment he was fond of giving to the claims of inventors. Justly prizing scientific discovery above all other possessions, he deemed the title to it so sacred, that you might hear him arguing by the hour to settle disputed rights; and if you ever perceived his temper ruffled, it was when one man's invention was claimed by, or given to, another; or when a clumsy adulation pressed upon himself that which he knew to be not his own. Sir Humphrey Davy says: