as well as downwards, he cared no more for lands.  He had noticed the mechanical power of steam, but had never seen an engine, and did not know that one existed out of his own brain.  This is the less wonderful, seeing there were only three then in America, and his science extended only to arithmetic.  When his minister showed him a drawing of Newcomen’s engine, in “Martin’s Philosophy,” he was chagrined to find that his invention had been anticipated in regard to the mode of producing the power, but he was confirmed in his belief of its availability for navigation.  With no better resources than a blacksmith’s shop could furnish, he set himself at work to make a steam-engine to test his theory.  His success is one of those wonders of human ingenuity struggling with difficulties, moral, financial, and physical combined, which deserve both a Homer and a Macaulay to celebrate and record them.  He was supposed by most people, and almost by himself, to have gone crazy.  If anything, at this day, is more incredible than the feat which he accomplished, it is the derision with which the public viewed his labors, decried his success, and sneered at the rags which betokened the honesty of his poverty.  To every one who had brains capable of logic, he had demonstrated the feasibility of his visions.  But no amount of even physical demonstration, then possible, could bring out the funds requisite to pecuniary profit, against the head-wind of public scorn.  It whistled down his high hopes of fortune.  At last, dropping the file and the hammer, he took the pen, determined, that, if others must get rich by his invention, he would at least save for himself the fame of it.  The result of his literary labors was an autobiography of great frankness and detail, extending to several hundred pages, and embracing almost every conceivable violation of standard English orthography, with which he seems to have had very little acquaintance or sympathy.  It was placed under seal in the Philadelphia Library, not to be opened for thirty years.  At the expiration of that period, in 1823, the seal was broken, and the quaint old manuscript, with the stamp of honest truth on every word, stood ready to reveal what the world is but just beginning to “want to know” about John Fitch.  He afterwards went to Europe to promote his steamboat interests,—­to little purpose, —­wandered about a few years, settled in Bardstown, Kentucky, made a model steamboat with a brass engine, drowned disappointment in the drink of that country, and at last departed by his own will, two years before the close of the last century.  A life so full of truth that is stranger than fiction ought not to be treated in the Dry-as-dust style, quite so largely as Mr. Westcott has done it.

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Life Beneath the Waters; or, The Aquarium in America.  Illustrated by Plates and Wood-Cuts drawn from Life.  By ARTHUR M. EDWARDS.  New York:  1858.