impressions noted down at the time are
worthy of record: "My first visit in England was to the starting station of
Sir Goldsworth Gurney's steam omnibus, running between London and Bath.
This carriage does not differ materially from other stage-coaches, nor has
it had any serious mishap as yet. For my benefit it manoeuvred back and
forth over the street pavement and later on the smooth macadam of the
highway, without any apparent difficulties of guiding. The drivers of other
stage-coaches are agreed that the thing is a success, and that before long
it will do them much harm."

[Sidenote: Lamarck]

Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, a forerunner of Charles Darwin died in this year.
As early as 1801 Lamarck had outlined his ideas of the transmutation of
species and attempted to explain the manner in which that transmutation had
been brought about. There is no such thing as a "species," he held; there
are only individuals descended from a common stock and modified in
structure to suit their environment. Lamarck was scoffed at in his own
time; he was respected as a naturalist, but unrecognized as a prophet.

1830

[Sidenote: First sewing machine]

Early in the year, Bartholemy Thimonnier, a French tailor, took out a
patent for his invention of a sewing machine. It was an invention destined
to revolutionize the manufacture of clothing and the matter of dress in all
civilized countries. Thimonnier's device was a chain stitch sewing machine
worked with a treadle. It had taken the inventor, ignorant as he was of
mechanics, four years of painful application to perfect it. The first to
recognize the real value of the invention was M. Beunier, supervisor of
mines at Paris. He took Thimonnier to Paris and installed him as a partner
and manager of a large clothing firm that manufactured army uniforms. They
set up eighty machines and did so well with them that the workmen of Paris,
profiting by the revolutionary disturbances of the times, wreaked their
vengeance on the new labor-saving device by wrecking the establishment. The
inventor was compelled to flee for life. During the same year, another
Frenchman, Charles Barbier, invented the system of raised printing for the
blind.

[Sidenote: Sir Thomas Lawrence]

Sir Thomas Lawrence, the celebrated English portrait painter, died at the
outset of the year. In his early youth at Bristol and Oxford, this artist
showed marked talent for portraiture, and became a pupil of Sir Joshua
R