The direct and almost instant benefits of Mechanical Inventions to their originators have been thus eloquently illustrated in the Edinburgh Review:—"Contributing, as they do, to our most immediate and pressing wants—appealing to the eye by their magnitude, and often by their grandeur, and associated, in many cases, with the warmer impulses of humanity and personal safety—the labours of the mechanist and engineer acquire a contemporary celebrity, which is not vouchsafed to the results of scientific research, or to the productions of literature and the fine arts. The gigantic steam-vessel, which expedites and facilitates the intercourse of nations—the canal, which unites two distant seas—the bridge and the aqueduct, which span an impassable valley—the harbour and the break-water, which shelter our vessels of peace and of war—the railway, which hurries us along on the wings of mechanism, and the light beacon which throws its directing beams over the deep—address themselves to the secular interests of every individual, and obtain for the engineer who invented or who planned them, a high and a well-merited popular reputation."