“then may clouds . . . rain may pour”—Perhaps because he failed to understand the gist of Darwinʼs figurative language, Ruskin substitutes a description of stormy weather for the originalʼs “imprisonʼd storms” that the steam engine has crowded inside a bellows, its “close cells of ribbed oak” confining the “struggling wind” until emitting the air with a “roar” through its “brazen nostrils” (Darwin, Poetical Works, 1:32). Or perhaps Ruskin understood Darwinʼs figurative language but decided to unpack the figure into its literal components, saving Darwinʼs unnamed bellows for later in his own poem, “The moving bellows that are made to roar” (line 21).

“the grinding stones . . . cotton fibres twirl”—Ruskin adopts Darwinʼs example of a benefit of steam, the mechanized mill, but he ignores Darwinʼs moralizing on the “Feast without blood!” that is provided by the increased production of grain “to nourish human-kind.” In a note, Darwin expounds on the superiority of a vegetable diet in an “economy of nature” that contributes to the “sum of general happiness” (Darwin, Poetical Works, 1:32–33). In place of this topic, Ruskin takes up Richard Awkrightʼs (1732–92) cotton spinning machinery, which Darwin celebrates in a different part of The Botanic Garden, in a section of The Loves of the Plants (1789) (Darwin, Poetical Works, 2:81–84).

“then showers the water . . . in quantity but small”—Ruskin reverses the order of Darwinʼs account of Matthew Boultonʼs coining machine (see “When furious up from mines the water pours” [“The Steam Engine”]: Discussion) and the steam‐powered pumping of water to cisterns and aqueducts.