seems to be the true representation of this period of his life, according to the light which the labors of M. Faugères have thrown upon it.

His most intimate friend at this time was the Duke de Roannez, subsequently associated with his other friends in the publication of his "Thoughts." Captivated by his genius and devoted to his person, the duke, according to the expression of Margaret Perier, "could not lose sight of him." An appartment was reserved for him in his hotel, where he would sometimes remain for days, although possessing a house of his own in Paris. Here Pascal would seem occasionally to have mingled in the light and careless society in which the youth of Paris then moved. We cannot, however, imagine that such society in itself attracted his interest. It was more a study for him, serving to originate some of those trains of reflection which he afterward pursued with such profit in the seclusion of Port Royal. As he listened to the conversational frivolities of a Chevalier de Méré, or the cynical sentiments of a Miton or Desbarreau, the first conceptions of his great vindication of morality and religion probably arose within him. "He touched for a moment with his feet," says M. Faugères," the impurities of this corrupt society, but his divine wings were never soiled."

The blandishment which now filled Pascal with delighted distraction was something very different. Charlotte Gonffier de RoanRez, the sister of his noble friend, then lived with him. About sixteen years of age, she possessed a captivating form and manner, while a sweet intelligence gave brightness and animation to her mere external graces. Pascal was constantly thrown in her company, and "what so natural," M. Faugères asks, "as that he should love; and overlooking their disparity of rank, secretly aspire to a union with the possessor of charms so irresist ible?" There can now, indeed, exist no doubt that he had ventured to cherish such feelings. Apart from the letters which he addressed to her at a later period, now published for the first time by M. Faugères, and so obviously revealing, under all the pious gravity of their style, a depth of tender solicitude which mere Christian interest will hardly explain, this fact is clearly established by the discovery of the

fine fragment, entitled "Discours sur les passions de l'Amour."* Here the evidence of a pure and fervid passion unmistakably manifests itself.

We naturally ask, with M. Faugères, Did Pascal find his love returned by the sister of his noble friend? There is reason to believe so, when we see a correspondence established between them, implying the highest degree of esteem and confidence. But it is to be regretted that we know nothing of the letters of Mademoiselle de Roannez; and it is, in fact, only fragments of those of Pascal that have been preserved. The rigidity of the Jansenist copyists have left us only such passages as they thought might minister to edification.

But whether or not Pascal's passion was shared, circumstances did not favor it. He had then acquired but little of the celebrity which afterward awaited him. His position was not a promising one, and his rank greatly inferior to that of the object of his attachment. Awakening from his brief enchantment, he no doubt deeply felt all this. He saw the vanity of the delicious dreams in which he had for a while forgotten himself. An alarming incident, which had nearly proved fatal to him, coöperated strongly to rouse him from the soft indulgences which were weaving their spell around him. In the month of October, 1654, while taking his usual drive along the bridge of Neuilly in a carriage with four horses, the two leaders became restive at a part where there was no parapet, and precipitated themselves into the Seine. Happily, the sudden violence of their leap broke the traces which yoked them to the pole, and the carriage remained on the verge of the precipice. The effects of such a shock upon the feeble and impaired frame of Pascal may be easily imagined. difficulty he recovered from the swoon into which he had fallen; but so shattered were his nerves, that for long afterward, during his sleepless nights and moments of depression, he constantly saw a precipice at his side, over which he seemed in danger of falling.

With

This striking incident has commonly been regarded as the sole cause which led

This fragment was brought to light by M. Cousin, and so highly did he value it that he considered it a sufficient reward of all his labors upon Pascal; labors to which we shall presently allude.

to Pascal's retirement from the world. The probable truth would seem to be, however, that it only combined with his sense of the apparent hopelessness of his passion to make him seek a refuge from disappointment, and a nobler source of enjoyment, in the sublime meditations and devout observances of religion. His sister Jaqueline had already prepared the way for this. We are told by Madame Perier that she had contemplated with great anxiety the manner in which her brother was mingling so freely with the world, and earnestly besought him to quit it. And with his mind now awed by so narrow an escape from death, and his heart cherishing a secret affection of which he dared not anticipate the fulfillment, her entreaties readily prevailed with him, and he finally withdrew into the pious seclusion of Port Royal des Champs, and became the associate of the holy men who have given to this spot so undying a name.

The Abbey of Port Royal, after a long period of relaxed discipline, during which many abuses had crept into it, had at length attained a high renown for sanctity, under the strict and vigorous rule of the Mère Angelique Arnaud. Appointed to her high office, when only eleven years old, through a deceit practiced upon the pope, she very soon began to manifest that she would be no party to the motives which had induced her election at so premature an age. An accidental sermon preached in the convent, when she had reached her sixteenth year, by a wandering Capuchin monk, left an impression upon her which was never effaced; and she set herself immediately to reform her establishment, and carried her measures into effect with a zeal and determination betokening that peculiar firmness of character which was destined to be so severely tried.

At this time the Papal Church in France was divided into the two great parties of the Jesuits and the Jansenists. The Abbey of Port Royal favored the latter, and had, indeed, under the directorship of M. de St. Cyran, become the great stronghold of this party. It would be out of place here to enter into the ground of this controversy. It will only be necessary to trace historically, in a few words, its rise, in order to enable the reader to understand the future relations and labors of Pascal.

(To be continued.)

THE DISCOVERY OF THE STEAMENGINE.

IF

F some of the greatest philosophers of antiquity, or of the middle ages, could re-appear they would perhaps see many of their own brilliant guesses and profound musings expanded into the sciences of modern times. Pythagoras might see his theory of the universe taught in every school, and illustrated in popular treatises; and Roger Bacon behold his anticipations verified in the beautiful discoveries of modern chemistry. They often saw in dim outline, and amid the glimmering of twilight, the truths which we calmly contemplate by the light of a bright noon: thus in some departments our knowledge differs from that of former ages in degree rather than in kind: they had mounted one or two steps upward; we have advanced a hundred.

But some of our discoveries are wholly modern, and never once, as far as we know, entered the minds of the ancient poets or sages. The steam-engine is one of these conquests of the world's old age, which its younger, that is, its past periods, did not even register as a “may be so," or a possibility; simply because the thing never entered their thoughts, never once projected its form along the horizon.

Had it been proposed by some oracle or superior being as a problem to such men as Aristotle and Archimedes, they might have admitted the idea; but as a guess or speculation, it never once appears. This may reasonably excite some surprise, as one essential element of the steam-engine must have frequently presented itself to their notice. We allude to the force exerted by steam, which must have been observed whenever boiling water was covered.

We should have expected that some of the subtile intellects, then struggling to obtain clear views of the phenomena around, would have stooped from speculating on the sublimities of metaphysics, to examine so simple a fact, and one so close at hand, as steam. But as thousands have seen apples fall from the bough without thinking of gravitation, so many generations looked upon steam forcing itself from the vessel, without asking the question," Cannot that power be made subservient to man, to lighten his labors and add to his joys?" Hard work and toilsome

struggles were then, as now, the lot of men. What an amount of strength, and even of life were expended on the pyramids! what efforts on the great Roman roads! much of which steam power would have saved; but this mighty agent was allowed to remain unemployed, while the world toiled on, digging, building, and hauling navies through the deep, by the hand. Yet, during these periods, academies-old, middle, and new-had risen, disputed, and departed; thousands of books had been written, even in those ages, and ten thousand curious speculations on things visible and invisible hazarded; but no man saw the sleeping giant, which in future ages should stretch his arms from sea to sea, and make his voice to be heard at the poles. Thus the elements of power are often in the world, close at its doors, but the world sees them not. It is not our purpose to describe the steam-engine itself; such details are perhaps too technical for the pages of a magazine; we rather desire to note the successive steps by which men reached the full knowledge of this world-moving power.

Reader, enter some store-yard; on one side you see a heap of coals, near is a brook, and in a corner lies a quantity of iron; hast thou skill to shape that iron, use that water, and so arrange those coals, that from them a power shall arise able to carry thee and all thy townspeople round the globe in five weeks? You are not much startled at the question; you have not, it may be, such mechanical knowledge, but feel quite assured that it is in the world that some whom you could name possess the power. Let us then trace the road by which this discovery has been gained.

For fifteen hundred years after the commencement of our era, men saw not the energies hidden in steam, and a whole academy of philosophers might have walked into the store-yard, and gazed upon the coal, iron, and water, without a thought of the steam-engine. During this long interval, however, a glance was taken by one man at steam as a moving power; it was but a recognition, for the force was not yet pressed into man's service.

The philosopher who first detected the applicability of steam to promote machine movement was an Egyptian mathematician and mechanist, (engineer we should call him,) Hero of Alexandria, about two

hundred years before Christ, who, in one of his treatises entitled "Pneumatic Machines," describes a circular motion given to a wheel by steam rushing through the spokes. This, though but a sort of mechanical toy, might have led others, even Hero himself, to dwell on the powers of steam; but his treatise remained unnoticed, and his experiment pointed in vain toward the road of further discovery. The schoolmen debated, the crusaders shook Europe and Asia, artillery filled statesmen and archers with forebodings, and a new world had been found beyond the Atlantic; yet, amid all this work of busy nations, steam power remained a hidden thing. At length, a singular revelation is made in 1543, and exhibited before thousands, but finds the world unprepared, and retires to its hiding-place. In that year the inhabitants of Barcelona were startled by the announcement that a Spanish captain, named Blasco de Garay, had offered to navigate a ship without sails or oars, and that the government had deemed the plan worthy of a trial in the harbor of the city. The day arrived, one in the bright month of June, well fitted to enable the Catalonians to see the new wonder cut the waters. Commissioners were appointed to watch the experiment, and report the results to the authorities. A vessel of two hundred tons burden, called the Trinity, was actually moved by steam, acting upon wheels, before the astonished city. Now the reader might expect that the management of steam power then began to excite the attention of men, especially of all who were aiming at the development of human resources. A strange disappointment is felt when we see the Spanish government rewarding Garay, and hear the majority of the commissioners report in favor of his invention, while no further results follow. What was the cause of this? Prejudice against the novelty and ignorance of the machine for de Garay kept his plan a secret-may have prevented success. All that was known was that he used a boiler and that wheels were turned by its agency. Is it possible, some one may ask, that a Spanish captain should invent the steam-engine, and unaided advance it to such perfection that a ship was moved through the waters by its action; and that such a discovery should be neglected by so ambitious a power as Spain? These things are stated as facts, and must be

received as true, however extraordinary. The machinery may have been clumsy, the working bad, and the power small; but that Blasco de Garay navigated a vessel by steam in 1543 cannot be reasonably denied. The experiment had little or no influence on the subsequent history of the steam-engine, and must be regarded as one of those bold movements which fail from unsuitableness to the age or the nations in which made. The attention of Europe had, however, been aroused; men began to feel that steam contained within it some element of mighty force, and thus the hitherto neglected power attracted the watching eyes of philosophers. During the next hundred years some notices appear indicating this altered feeling.

An engineer of Louis XIII., who became clerk of the works to the Prince of Wales in the time of James I., paid some attention to the subject; and an Italian mechanist, named Giovanni Bianca, proposed to turn mills by steam. Thus, at the beginning of the seventeenth century men seemed watching for the birth of the new power. Amid the fury of theological strife, and the rancor of political warfare, while England was distracted by civil commotions, and battles raged by sea and land, the element destined to unite distant nations, and form the world into one great household, was slowly rising from its concealment of many ages. We now approach the period when the notion of steam power assumed a clear and distinct form, and took its place among the reasonable speculations and experiments of thoughtful men.

Edward Somerset, Marquis of Worcester, had engaged with ardor on the side of the unfortunate Charles I., and found himself at last in the Tower of London, his friends dead or exiled, his property in other hands, and the cause for which he had fought and suffered trampled to the dust.

What now occupied the thoughts of the royalist noble? Some have enlivened the solitude of a dungeon by watching the habits of a spider, or observing the growth of a flower in their prison window; he turned his active mind to the unexplored realms of science, and gazed inquiringly along those paths at the entrance of which Bacon had raised the clear sign-posts, with the finger of true philosophy pointing the stranger in the direction which the world

had so often groped for, and so often missed. To this imprisoned nobleman is ascribed the first well-digested idea of the steam-engine. How did the thought reach him? By what is commonly called an accident, or more properly by the happy observation of a simple and most common occurrence, and by just reasoning upon the fact noticed.

We must imagine the marquis seated in his small prison-room; on the fire is a pot, in which his dinner is preparing; his thoughts are not upon the meal, but flitting to and fro, across the numerous battlefields, where the Stuart banner had drooped, or picturing the solemn and mournful circumstances of that 30th of January, 1649, when a king died by the headsman's hand. These reflections have, however, too often before occupied his mind, which is, therefore, easily drawn from such gloomy reminiscences to the events close at hand. What is that upon which Edward Somerset gazes so fixedly? That fire is not the alchemist's furnace, nor that pot a Rosicrucian crucible, and yet his eyes refuse to move therefrom. Naught is visible, save the hissing steam rushing from the pot, and the sharp risings and fallings of the lid, forced up by the expanded vapor. He has heard of men who regarded steam as capable of becoming a strong and untiring servant of mankind, and now sees those feeble heavings of its infantine energies with some strange fluttering anticipations. New thoughts crowd upon him, from which he, closely interrogating, sees other and still more startling ideas rise. The quietude of a prison enabled him calmly to follow out and test his opinions, which were published after the Restoration in a book entitled "The Scantling of One Hundred Inventions." Those who can obtain access to the work may read in the sixty-eighth invention the theory of the Marquis of Worcester, and discern the point in the line of discovery to which he reached. The production of steam in one vessel or boiler, and its passage to another, in which its force should act upon the machinery, were included in his theory, and this is still the principle of action in our modern engines. Thus the Marquis of Worcester first marked out the plan of this mighty machine.

A great step was now made in the discovery; the notion of the boiler in which