As Trevithick was entirely without means at his death, besides being some sixty pounds in debt to the landlord of the Bull Inn, where he had been lodging for nearly a year, he would probably have been buried at the expense of the parish but for the Messrs. Hall and their workmen, who raised a sum sufficient to give the "great inventor" a decent burial; and they followed his remains to the grave in Deptford Church-yard, where he lies without a stone to mark his resting-place. * * * * * There can be no doubt as to the great mechanical ability of Trevithick. He was a man of original and intuitive genius in invention. Every mechanical arrangement which he undertook to study issued from his hands transformed and improved. But there he rested. He struck out many inventions, and left them to take care of themselves. His great failing was the want of perseverance. His mind was always full of projects; but his very genius led him astray in search of new things, while his imagination often outran his judgment. Hence his life was but a series of beginnings. Look at the extraordinary things that Trevithick began. He made the first railway locomotive, and cast the invention aside, leaving it to others to take it up and prosecute it to a successful issue. He introduced, if he did not invent, the cylindrical boiler and the high-pressure engine, which increased so enormously the steam-power of the world; but he reaped the profits of neither. He invented an oscillating engine and a screw propeller; he took out a patent for using superheated steam, as well as for wrought-iron ships and wrought-iron floating docks; but he left it to others to introduce these several inventions. Never was there such a series of splendid mechanical beginnings. He began a Thames Tunnel and abandoned it. He went to South America with the prospect of making a gigantic fortune, but he had scarcely begun to gather in his gold than he was forced to fly, and returned home destitute. This last event, however, was a misfortune which no efforts on his part could have prevented. But even when he had the best chances, Trevithick threw them away. When he had brought his road locomotive to London to exhibit, and was beginning to excite the curiosity of the public respecting it, he suddenly closed the exhibition in a fit of caprice, removed the engine, and returned to Cornwall in a tiff. The failure, also, of the railroad on which his locomotive traveled so provoked him that he at once abandoned the enterprise in disgust.