wealth flowed into the hands of Boulton and Watt; and in the year 1800 Mr. Watt was enabled to retire from the firm possessed of a large competency, and leaving the exclusive privilege of the sale of the engine to Boulton. Boswell, who visited Soho in 1776, shortly after the manufacture of steam-engines had been commenced there, was greatly struck by the vastness and contrivance of the machinery. "I shall never forget," he says, "Mr. Boulton's expression to me when surveying the works: 'I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have--_Power_.' He had," continues Boswell, "about 700 people at work; I contemplated him as an iron chieftain, and he seemed to be the father of his tribe."[3] In 1785 Mr. Boulton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and two or three years after this, turned his attention to the subject of coining, to the improvement of which art he devoted the last twenty years of his life. He erected extensive machinery for this purpose, and by uniting some processes originating in France with new kinds of presses, he was enabled to obtain great rapidity of action combined with the utmost perfection in the articles produced; so much so, that having been employed by the British Government to recoin the whole of the British specie, he rendered counterfeits nearly impossible by the economy and excellence of his work. In addition to this, Mr. Boulton planned and directed the arrangement of the machinery in the British Mint, and executed that for the coining department. He also constructed the machinery for the great national mints of St. Petersburgh and Copenhagen; his son, to whom the establishment at Soho devolved upon his death, doing the same for the extensive and splendid establishments of the East India Company at Bombay and Calcutta. Boulton died August 17, 1809, in his eighty-first year, and his remains were borne to the grave by the oldest workmen connected with the works at Soho; five hundred persons belonging to that establishment joined in the procession, which numbered among its ranks several thousand individuals, to whom medals were given recording the age of the deceased and the date of his death.--_Stuart's Anecdotes of the Steam Engine._ London, 1829.--_Muirhead's Translation of Arago's Life of J. Watt._ London, 1839. JOSEPH BRAMAH. Born April 13, 1749. Died December 9, 1814.