come with you, wasn't it?" said the old man, as he bade me good-by at the station.

Four days afterwards, I cabled Gauge & Swallow that I had left their service. Mr. Burrill arrived in New York on the returning steamer with the defaulter, who made partial restitution but was bound over for trial. The proceedings dragged mysteriously. He was finally released on bail, and after the matter was thought to have been forgotten it was casually reported by the press that the proceedings against him had been discontinued. The examination showed a great many important papers which should have been in the care of Gauge & Swallow to be missing. The resulting damage was not easy to be measured, and the cunning thief boldly demanded exemption from punishment as the price of their restoration. People wondered at the lenity displayed. What would have been thought if they had known that the very magnitude and boldness of his transactions had secured him not only immunity from punishment but the enjoyment of a comfortable fortune? He soon became famous on "the street," and will probably some day become one of the most potent magnates of finance. We hear a good deal in fiction and philosophy about the policy of honesty, which is always highly commended by those who know nothing of life or find it profitable to flatter. It is only the lawyer who really comprehends the profit there is in knavery, and knows what a shrinkage of values there would be among the "solid" men of the city if the premiums on rascality were deducted from their bank-accounts. Albion W. Tourgee.

A DERVISH

IKE Joseph's coat his tattered raiment shows
A rainbow blending of its countless hues;
The desert dust has stained his pilgrim shoes,
His frame is gaunt, yet on and on he goes.
Few are the hours his weary limbs repose,
Few are the drops that wet his earthen cruse;
The path is long, the sharp flints cut and bruise,
And yet at heart a dreamful rest he knows.

His visions are of calm celestial days,-
Of peaceful groves of palm beyond the skies;
Forever shine before his ardent eyes

The fountained heavenly courts through golden haze:
He deems the more he bears on mortal ways
The greater his reward in Paradise.

Clinton Scollard.

OUR GREATEST INVENTOR.

HEN John Ericsson died, a few weeks ago, there was little more mention of him in the newspapers, outside of his own city, than would have been accorded a local political "boss" or a man who had become rich by the sale of a worthless or dangerous patent medicine. In New York, which had been his home for nearly half a century, the comments upon his life and career occupied no more space than is frequently given to the matrimonial vagaries of an opéra-bouffe girl. Judged by commercial standards, the newspapers were perhaps not to be blamed, for the majority of their readers care little for scientific achievements except in concrete form. Of those who knew Ericsson by name, few had heard much about him except that he designed the historic Monitor,-a vessel of a type which has become unfashionable, if not obsolete, in naval architecture,-and those who knew him better were not of the class which talks a great deal.

Yet, if asked to name an inventor and adapter who had accomplished more and laid the world under greater obligations than Ericsson, the best-informed man would be at a loss. Comparisons are odious when the values of great inventions are considered, but except in the department of electricity it would be difficult to name any inventor who was Ericsson's peer. Yet the country has often rung with the praises of some new contrivance and its originator, while a great genius was busily coining his brains into public benefit with little or no recognition from men outside of his own profession.

That Ericsson and his work were not better known was largely the fault-if fault it was-of the inventor himself. He was utterly destitute of desire for notoriety; stranger still, he never seemed to imagine there could be any gain to him in exploiting his projects. The latterday inventor generally takes the public into his confidence, and finds profit in so doing; no matter how valuable his time, he always can spare some for the reporter who can publish an "interview" in a newspaper of fair circulation. No sooner has he an idea that seems promising than he hurries a model together, applies for a patent, and organizes a company to "develop" his theory. He, or his company, floods the country with circulars and invades it with agents and canvassers. Ericsson, on the contrary, kept his ideas to himself, after a little experience in the dangers of talking before patenting; he seldom offered any of his ideas to the public until they were fully developed and tested; even then they were seldom publicly associated with his name. He seemed to work for the sake of working; he made some money, and always was "forehanded," but his principal satisfaction and remuneration were in the successful working of his inventions. He knew well that men of his own profession, or in kindred callings, must know of his work and esteem it at its proper value; for the opinions of the world at large he had as much contempt as the veriest aristocrat.

Of too large nature to be conceited, he nevertheless estimated all

his inventions at their full worth: assuming that all other sensible persons would do likewise, it never occurred to him to claim any special attention. Only once in his long American career did he show any sign of pique or offended pride: it was when the managers of our great Exhibition in 1876-an exhibition intended primarily to show what had been our national progress in a hundred years-passed him by. The old man-for already he had passed more than threescore years and ten-dropped tools and models, seized his pen, and wrote a book which from its size and shape might easily be mistaken for Worcester's or Webster's dictionary. There was not a superfluous word in it, yet it was only a series of descriptions of his inventions and other contributions to scientific progress during the years he had resided in America. The only evidence of feeling which the book contained was in the opening paragraph, which read as follows:

"The Commissioners of the Centennial Exhibition having omitted to invite me to exhibit the results of my labors connected with mechanics and physics, a gap in their record of material progress exceeding one-third of a century has been occasioned."

Coming from any other American, such a statement would have seemed pompous and vain; but Ericsson told only the bald truth. In proof of this he gave a list of his inventions in the United States, or developed after his arrival here in 1839. They numbered nearly fifty, and none of them were unimportant. The list astonished thousands of engineers and members of allied professions, some of whom learned for the first time of the completion, long before, of machines and instruments for purposes for which they themselves had long been endeavoring to contrive something. As the book was printed only for private circulation, and in limited numbers, it is probable that the mention of some of the author's inventions might yet astonish many clever constructors who are aspiring to prominence in applied science. The list is too long to print here, and portions of it would be unintelligible to the unscientific reader, but in illustration of the range of the inventor's mind it may be said that besides his improvements in naval and marine architecture, propulsion, and armament, and the motors that bear his name, he made the first steam fire-engine ever used in the world, built the first wrought-iron "reinforced" cannon, and made delicate instruments for measuring the reflective power of metals, the conductivity of mercury, and the actual intensity of the sun's rays, and an instrument for measuring distances at sea. It may be unnecessary to say that when his formidable list, and the still more formidable volume containing it, were brought to the notice of the Exhibition Commissioners, they promptly made suitable acknowledgments to the over.looked inventor.

Many of Ericsson's scientific devices have names which would scarcely be self-explanatory, but they have been invaluable in facilitating mechanical efforts of which the public accept the finished product without knowing its origin and development. Others, however, are far more widely known than the name of their inventor. One of these is the screw propeller, which, though not first applied to a vessel in this country, was here first so used as to attract the attention of the

world and revolutionize steam navigation. The United States war-vessel Princeton, engined and propelled after Ericsson's designs, was not only the fastest war-ship afloat, but her designer had provided for engines which should be entirely below the water-line,-a modification the practical value of which was instantly perceived by the world. Previous to the building of the Princeton, opposition of steam for naval vessels came as much from common sense as from sentiment and prejudice, for a well-directed shot or two could disable the ship by striking a paddle-wheel or passing through the engine-room: with the entire submersion of the wheel, however, and the depression of the engine, began the earnest study of steam navigation as part of the science of naval warfare.

Either of the two great improvements exemplified in the Princeton would have made any ordinary inventor satisfied and careless; but Ericsson displayed the grand comprehensiveness of mind which afterwards was turned to so good account in the Monitor. He wished to provide against all possible disasters, and he did it effectively. As speed depended upon steam, and high pressure could be attained only by hot fires, the smoke-stacks or chimneys of ships were made very tall, and therefore were good marks for gunners. Ericsson devised the "telescoping" smoke-stack; to prevent poor draught and insufficient steam while the smoke-stack was lowered in action, he invented "blowers" to intensify combustion. At this stage his proper work should have been completed, but, hearing a wish expressed that the cumbrous "breeching" of cannon might be done away with, he devised a new gun-carriage which took up the force of the gun's recoil. Afterwards, on the suggestion that a wrought-iron gun should be attempted, he made for the Princeton the first twelve-inch wrought-iron gun in the world. Fear being expressed that this gun might be too weak, he strengthened it with iron bands extending from breech to trunnions, thus preceding Krupp, Armstrong, and all later makers of reinforced ordnance. It was not this gun, but a much heavier one, of the same calibre, which afterwards burst on the Princeton and killed a score of persons, including the Secretary of the Navy.

The world rang with praises of the Princeton and her inventor, and in naval ship-yards everywhere began that imitation which is the sincerest form of admiration as well as of flattery. England, whose Lords of Admiralty had refused the screw propeller several years before, because in their opinion there was no room astern for screw and rudder too, lost no time in taking pattern after the Yankee ship; meanwhile, marine and inland vessels everywhere were adopting the screw in preference to the paddle-wheel. The "twin screw propeller" with independent engines, which has just been used so effectively by the new Inman steamer City of Paris, and is talked of by Atlantic travellers as a brilliant novelty, was successfully used by Ericsson more than fifty years ago, in a Thames River tug-boat, and again, nearly twenty years ago, in thirty different gun-boats built by Ericsson for the Spanish government. The probable reason for the neglect of the principle since that time is that the United States, generally the first nation to "prove all things [mechanical] and hold fast to that which is good," is

not allowed to build merchant-ships to any extent, and has only just begun to build a navy.

The Monitor, the most noted of Ericsson's achievements, at least to a generation which has a deplorable faculty for forgetting whatever is not new, is persistently regarded as a sudden inspiration due to our civil war, but was really designed many years before: a model of a similar vessel was presented by Ericsson to Louis Napoleon in 1854. It was too startling an innovation to be tolerated, even by change-loving Frenchmen or enterprising Americans. In his great Centennial volume Ericsson says nothing of the persistent reluctance of our government and our naval officers to see anything practicable in the plan of the Monitor, but it is a matter of history that when the boat was finally contracted for the conditions were the most arbitrary ever imposed by our government, and even then the contract was given more to oblige a clear-sighted Yankee from the same State as the Secretary of the Navy than through any faith in the efficiency of the vessel.

The opportune arrival of the Monitor in Hampton Roads will always be regarded as the most startling of the world's historic "coincidences." Quite as significant, however, is the fact that a fighting machine so simple, appropriate, and explicable, by an inventor and constructor of world-wide fame and undoubted sincerity, could not be brought by ordinary means to the attention of a government in dire need of all the fighting help it could get from any source. Great as were Ericsson and his invention, the really powerful and seaworthy Confederate iron-clad monster Merrimac might easily have laid every Northern seaport in ashes or under contribution had not the tongue of a persistent Yankee come to our rescue. Our national gallery of heroes of the civil war will not be complete until it contains a picture of a Connecticut Yankee, who was neither sailor nor artillerist, explaining seamanship and gunnery to the alleged experts but veritable incompetents in whom a nation was implicitly trusting.

The building of the Monitor, small and simple though she seemed, was in itself an achievement which added greatly to Ericsson's fame among men who knew the various processes of marine design and construction. When the contract was signed, only an outline sketch and verbal and written explanations had been offered. All the working designs had still to be made, even for the engines, for no patterns in existence were of any service in so radical a departure from war-craft in general. Half a dozen different inventions, all by Ericsson, had their first trial in the engines of the Monitor, and drawings, to scale, had to be made of all for the foundry. Yet in one hundred days from the laying of the keel the little ship was launched with her machinery complete and in working order, and at smaller cost than any iron warvessel of similar size and armament that has since been built.

But had the inventor attempted to rest on his laurels, and be comforted by the flattering unction laid to his soul by the non-fighting portion of the world, he would have been grievously disappointed. Fossilization is a process which goes on rapidly in official life everywhere, and our navy was no exception to the rule. No words could express the disgust and detestation with which many of our high naval

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