We mentioned just now that James Watt always refrained from interesting himself financially in the steamboat, although it was his own improved form of engines which made the steamboat a success. But “like father” is not always “like son” in the race of progress, and in 1816 we find James Watt, Jun., purchasing a steamboat called the _Caledonia_, which had also come round from the Clyde to the Thames. After fitting her with new engines he took her from Margate to Rotterdam and so on to Coblenz: she was eventually sold to the King of Denmark. Other vessels of about eighty or ninety feet in length, sometimes with engines by Boulton and Watt of about twenty horse-power (nominal), were also presently witnessed on the pea-green waters of the Thames estuary. And before the second decade of the nineteenth century was ended steamer communication for cross-Channel services between England and France, and England and Ireland had already been instituted. But as I shall deal with this branch of steamship enterprise in a separate chapter, I need not make any further remark upon that subject now. [Illustration: SS. “ELIZABETH” (1815).] [Illustration: RUSSIAN PASSENGER STEAMER (1817). _From Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum._] In the history of the sailing ship the flow of progress was from east to west, from Babylon to North America, and then it ebbed back again, bearing in its stream improvements which newer nations had been able to effect to the sail-propelled ship. To an extent, something of the same kind happened in the case of the steamship. The latter’s physically-driven, paddle-wheel prototype began, if not in China, at least in the Mediterranean, and the first efforts of steam propulsion were made not many hundred miles north of this. Then, after the Fulda, the Saône, and the Seine, the movement was to the Hudson, and so back to Europe through Great Britain and on to Germany and Russia. Of the progress in steam navigation made in the two latter countries about this time the illustrations facing page 84 are interesting instances, and we shall deal with them presently. But before we proceed to discuss them let us turn back for a moment to Robert Fulton. After he had at length established the steamboat as a thoroughly sound concern in America we find him not unnaturally sighing for other countries to conquer. Accordingly he set his mind on introducing the steamboat not merely on the chief rivers of North America, but even on the Ganges and the Neva. The year in which Bell’s _Comet_ had come into service Fulton had actually entered into a contract with one Thomas Lane to introduce steamboats into India, and on April 12th of that year he wrote to a Russian gentleman, who was then staying in London, with reference to obtaining an exclusive contract for twenty years, for establishing a steamboat service between St. Petersburg and Cronstadt within three years after obtaining the grant. It is evident from