Page:Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat.djvu/24

2 well, and Clausius were such in mathematical physics. Among engineers, we have the examples of Watt as inventor and philosopher, Rankine as his mathematical complement, developing the theory of that art of which Watt illustrated the practical side; we have Hirn as engineer-experimentalist, and philosopher, as well; Corliss as inventor and constructor; and a dozen creators of the machinery of the textile manufactures, in which, in the adjustment of cam-work, the highest genius of the mechanic appears.

But Carnot exhibited that most marked characteristic of real genius, the power of applying such qualities as I have just enumerated to great purposes and with great result while still a youth. Genius is not dependent, as is talent, upon the ripening and the growth of years for its prescience; it is ready at the earliest maturity, and sometimes earlier, to exhibit its marvellous works; as, for example, note Hamilton the mathematician and Mill the logician; the one becoming master of a dozen languages when hardly more than as many years of age, reading Newton's Principia at sixteen and conceiving that wonderful system, quaternions, at eighteen; the other competent to begin the study of Greek at three, learning Latin at seven and reading Plato before he