Page:Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat.djvu/63

Rh the most distant nations. It tends to unite the nations of the earth as inhahitants of one country. In fact, to lessen the time, the fatigues, the uncertainties, and the dangers of travel—is not this the same as greatly to shorten distances?

The discovery of the steam-engine owed its birth, like most human inventions, to rude attempts which have been attributed to different persons, while the real author is not certainly known. It is, however, less in the first attempts that the principal discovery consists, than in the successive improvements which have brought steam-engines to the condition in which we find them to-day. There is almost as great a distance between the first apparatus in which the expansive force of steam was displayed and the existing machine, as between the first raft that man ever made and the modern vessel.

If the honor of a discovery belongs to the nation in which it has acquired its growth and all its developments, this honor cannot be here refused