ten visited by Wesley. The boy, educated at
Camborne, was bright and precocious; he is said on one occasion to
have irritated his master by offering to do six sums to his one--a
proposition which no pedagogue is likely to appreciate. He was
powerfully developed physically, and at eighteen could lift ten
hundredweight. In 1794 he became engineer at the Ding Dong Mine, where
he introduced many improvements; and a few years later he was busily
engaged in designing a genuine steam-carriage, which was finished and
made its first short trip on Christmas Eve, 1801, carrying the first
passengers ever known to have been conveyed by steam. Locally this
contrivance was known as the "puffing devil," or as "Cap'n Dick's
Puffer." The next step was to produce an engine running on rails. This
was done in 1804, when Trevithick completed a machine which carried
ten tons of iron, five wagons, and seventy men for a distance of nine
and a half miles, the speed being about five miles an hour. Clumsy and
slow as it was, this was a very marked advance on anything that had
previously been accomplished. But the engineer's genius for invention
was not balanced by adequate business capacity, and he lacked the
means of perfecting and forwarding his devices; they had to wait. He
went to Peru in 1817, and suffered heavy losses through the war of
independence. At this time he was nearly drowned in the Magdalena
River, but was rescued by a Venezuelan officer, who drew him ashore
with a lasso. It is pleasant to learn that he made the acquaintance of
George Stephenson at Carthagena, and received generous help from one
who might have been considered his rival. He died poor and in debt at
Dartford in 1833, when the workmen with whom he had been labouring
clubbed together to give him a suitable funeral. There is now a
memorial window to his memory in Westminster Abbey. His character
seems to have been warm and sanguine, tender-hearted, and easily
depressed. He was notably one of those men into whose labours "other
men enter"--successful to a point, but lacking in the finishing
touches that bring fame and triumph; with all his courage he wanted
persistence. But when we think of Watt and Stephenson in connection
with steam transit we must never forget that the Cornishman Trevithick
deserves at least an equal share of honour.

Illogan is a mining centre, and thickly populated, though when we
speak of population in Cornwall we must remember that the inhabitants