It may be presumptuous in me to add anything in my own words to such just and exalted praise. Let me rather borrow the language in which the great father of modern philosophy, Lord Bacon himself, has spoken of inventors in the arts of life. In a beautiful, though not very generally read fragment of his, called the New Atlantis, a voyage to an imaginary island, he has imagined a university, or rather royal society, under the name of Solomon's House, or the College of the Six Days' Works; and among the various buildings appropriated to this institution, he describes a gallery destined to contain the statues of inventors. He does not disdain to place in it not only the inventor of one of the greatest instruments of science, but the discoverer of the use of the silkworm, and of other still more humble contrivances for the comfort of man. What place would Lord Bacon have assigned in such a gallery to the statue of Mr. Watt? Is it too much to say, that, considering the magnitude of the discoveries, the genius and science necessary to make them, and the benefits arising from them to the world, that statue must have been placed at the head of those of all inventors in all ages and nations. In another part of his writings the same great man illustrates the dignity of useful inventions by one of those happy allusions to the beautiful mythology of the ancients, which he often employs to illuminate as well as to decorate reason. "The dignity," says he, "of this end of endowment of man's life with new commodity appeareth, by the estimation that antiquity made of such as guided thereunto; for whereas founders of states, lawgivers, extirpators of tyrants, fathers of the people, were honored but with the titles of demigods, inventors were ever consecrated amongst the gods themselves." The Earl of Aberdeen says: