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business sagacity which enabled him to win the highest prizes in many a hard-fought battle all round the world. These battles were peaceful contests between rival makers of machines in every country. The London Times covered his earlier machine with ridicule before the first trial began, and honestly sang its highest praise the day after. McCormick was born in Rockbridge, Virginia, February 15, 1809, and died May 13, 1884.

The new phase in the history of inventions upon which we are entering seems to throw backward a strong light, bringing out in vivid contrast one

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Cha Goodpas

strange and interesting figure. The present workers proceed on simple lines, seeking for the unknown by study and scientific research. Many of the past inventors simply guessed and guessed, asking with sublime yet mistaken patience endless questions of nature. This striking personage in the group of truth seekers is that of Charles Goodyear. He saw new properties in the gum of a tree. He had faith that there must be some substance, some method of treating it whereby its nature could be changed. He did not know. What better than to ask and ask again in tireless reiteration. He would find out, like a Palissy, by incessant trying. There

is an end to that road, if the man have years enough and patience enough to find it. He found it, as such men always do, suddenly and in an unexpected way. Apparently an accident. Perhaps so, just as the bursting out of a spring in a dry land is an accident. For all that observe the man -his life is the main thing. Some one would have stumbled upon the vulcanization of rubber in time. Few men would have shown his patience and perseverance. Charles Goodyear was born in New Haven, Conn., Dec. 29, 1800, and died July 1, 1860. His life is tinged with disappointment, by reason of the selfishness of men and the stupidity of European patent laws, yet he lived to win honors at the hands of the very nations who, perhaps unwittingly, robbed him of his rights.

Goodyear is perhaps the last of the discoverers by blind experiment. The new men must follow the steps of the younger Edison, who invents by the law of probability. Thomas Alva Edison was born in an obscure canal village in Erie Co., New York, February 11, 1847. More has been written about this inventor than any who ever lived, and there is no need to repeat the wondrous tale. The point to be observed now lies in the fact that he stands as the leader of the new men, his work an example of the new methods of invention. He asks questions of nature by finding out, first, all the known, then proving it over again by retrial, then he considers the probable, the most natural in the unknown. No blind guessing. A careful, deliberate search in a new direction. If nothing appears, "hark back," and begin again at the next most likely opening. There can be but one end. He finds a way, opens a gate to the new country, and returns with a complete map of all its coasts and headlands. Such a man adds to the sum of human knowledge at every step, and every new discovery is a proved fact, useful forever after. He doubts with a splendid courage all that is said of nature, till he knows it for himself, and then he moves on to the unknown with a courage born of conviction. He arrives at things because he has the compass of personal knowledge. These few words concerning the most remarkable inventor who ever lived are the result of personal observation of the man at his work since the day he began his greater labors. The lesson of his life is found in the fact that he has proved that invention is an art and not a happy guessing, that discovery is a wise search, not a drifting in the fogs of ignorance. His life is the greatest incentive to our young people to be found in modern history. It teaches to work, it points out the new path, at once laborious, scientific, exact, and ending at success.

Beside these mén-Whitney, Howe, Goodyear, Blanchard, and Lyall and Edison who still are with us-stand Morse, Bigelow, Fulton, Alexan

VOL. XII.-No. 4.-20

der Graham Bell, George Westinghouse, Jr., all inventors and benefactors of their times. Beyond these greater names is a vast multitude of workers, each striving to solve some question in nature or in some form to lighten human

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labor. To tell of all would fill a library, and I can only briefly catalogue some of their more recent works that have come under my personal observation. Since I began to study the works of our inventors, the following tools, machines, and methods have been introduced into business and manufactures: The type-writer, the telephone, the photographic dry plate, the air-brake, the dynamo and electric lights, the regenerative gas-lamp, the positive-motion loom, the microphone, the sand blast, water-gas, toughened glass, the silo, the ice machine, luminous paint, the paper car

wheel, the pnuematic riveting machine, electric railway, the whole range of elevators and domestic pumping engines, emery grinding, flexible shafting, synchronous telegraphy, multiple cylinder engines, and photo-engraving. All of these, together with every one of Edison's inventions, are of our own times, and setting aside a few of Edison's, are in actual commercial use. The effect upon the world of this multitude of improvements is past description or calculation. They have overturned and ruined whole industries and created countless new ones. In any other time or country they would have produced social wars and revolutions. That they have not done so, and that they have been of the greatest benefit to our people, indicate, it seems to me, the new spirit of our time, the new phase in the history of this country. When the history of these new inventions is written, when the lives of the new men are told, let us hope that all the warfare, the poverty, and suffering of the past are at an end, and that Edison's life shall really point the way to new hopes, new labors and new triumphs for the benefit of all the people.

Charles Barnard

MONROE AND THE RHEA LETTER

THE Seminole War of 1817-18 was hardly worthy of its imposing title, so far as concerned the belligerent parties themselves and their encounters; but in respect of the political controversies, domestic and international, which General Jackson's conduct of that war provoked, it assumes in our history a memorable importance. Roving Indians from East Florida, a province which Spain at that time held by a feeble and loosening grasp, approached Fort Scott on the Georgia frontier, surprised a boat-load of United States troops with their wives and children, who were ascending the Appalachicola river, and cruelly butchered the whole party. The administration at Washington, on receiving the startling news, ordered General Jackson to the front. The hero of New Orleans displayed his customary energy and promptness. Having raised an additional force of volunteers, he marched rapidly from Nashville to the Southern frontiers, and drove the bloodthirsty Seminoles into Florida. Pursued to St. Mark's after a slight encounter, the enemy escaped southward into their inaccessible swamps, and in less than six months from the date of the massacre this Indian war was over.

But Jackson was not content that hostilities should end thus easily. Two British subjects had come into his hands, Arbuthnot and Ambrister; and these, having been tried by drum-head court-martial on the charge of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, he caused to be summarily executed, the one hanged and the other shot. Next, turning aside from the homeward march, he captured Pensacola, as he had already captured St. Mark's, against the protest of the Spanish commander, and hoisted the stars and stripes in place of the Spanish colors; here once more alleging that the king's officers thus displaced had instigated the Seminoles to make war over the American borders. The British people were greatly incensed at what they called the murder of two fellow-countrymen; and as Castlereagh told Minister Rush, there would have been a war over this "if the ministry had but held up a finger;" but the British ministry, having at this time the strongest motives for maintaining cordial relations with the United States, waived apologies. As for Spain, King Ferdinand betrayed an impotent rage; but President Monroe promptly disavowed General Jackson's acts and restored the Spanish posts, at the same time sustaining in the main our General's charges of Spanish complicity; in which posture of affairs the

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