CHAPTER XI.
SHIPBUILDING IN BELFAST--ITS ORIGIN AND PROGRESS.
BY SIR E.J.HARLAND, ENGINEER AND SHIPBUILDER.
"The useful arts are but reproductions or new combinations by the art of man, of the same natural benefactors.

He no longer waits for favouring gales, but by means of steam he realises the fable of AEolus's bag, and carries the two-and-thirty winds in the boiler of his boat."-- Emerson.
"The most exquisite and the most expensive machinery is brought into play where operations on the most common materials are to be performed, because these are executed on the widest scale.

This is the meaning of the vast and astonishing prevalence of machine work in this country: that the machine, with its million fingers, works for millions of purchasers, while in remote countries, where magnificence and savagery stand side by side, tens of thousands work for one.

There Art labours for the rich alone; here she works for the poor no less.

There the multitude produce only to give splendour and grace to the despot or the warrior, whose slaves they are, and whom they enrich; here the man who is powerful in the weapons of peace, capital, and machinery, uses them to give comfort and enjoyment to the public, whose servant he is, and thus becomes rich while he enriches others with his goods."-- William Whewell, D.D.
I was born at Scarborough in May, 1831, the sixth of a family of eight.
My father was a native of Rosedale, half-way between Whitby and Pickering: his nurse was the sister of Captain Scoresby, celebrated as an Arctic explorer.