“Our apparatus was very simple.  At each terminus of our line, so to speak, we had a room, inaccessible save to ourselves.  These rooms, darkened, and carefully kept at a fixed temperature, contained nothing, save, in one corner of each, a chronometer regulated with precision, and, in opposite corners, a set of boxes, containing each a snail.  At the signalling end, at a fixed hour, which the chronometer gives with the greatest accuracy, and when I know that my partner, by agreement, will be present at the other end to receive intelligence, I go into my room, informed as to the condition of the Liverpool market, and prepared to transmit particulars of the same to him.  Here are two boxes, divided into three compartments each, and a male snail in each compartment.  If flour is down, offering a chance for profit in New York upon ‘time’ sales, I approach the box marked minus, the three snails of which are called x, y, and z.  I take up a little tube,—­such a one as is used by chemists to drop infinitesimal portions of any liquid; I dip this into a vial marked No. 1, containing a solution of salt in water,—­there is a row of these vials, the solution in each being of a different strength,—­and then, with the moistened tube, I touch snail x, or snail y, or snail z, or any two of them, or all three, once, twice, three times, or repeatedly, according to the news I wish to signal,—­noting the effect of the poison, and recording the particulars in a book kept for the purpose,—­recording them with a nicety of intelligent discrimination such as can be obtained only by long and practised observation.  I send an abstract of this record by every mail to my partner, so as to verify our results and to detect immediately any derangement.  At his end of our line the brave John Meavy waits before two similar boxes, in each compartment of which is a female snail.  He is a skilled observer, and his quick eve beholds snails a, b, c exactly (through sympathy) repeating the effects I am producing in x, y, z,—­though the distance between them is over three thousand miles!  He knows the meaning of these slight effects, and, going upon ’Change, buys or sells with a perfect assurance of profit.

“Such was my telegraph, in its rudest outline; but I had systematized it to a degree of far greater nicety.  I provided entirely against man’s imperfect and defective powers of observation.  These movements and squirmings, which in snails x, y, z, were the effect of a physical cause, (salt-water.) were, in snails a, b, c, the result of sympathy for x, y, z, as I have said,—­a result constant, determinate, and always to be depended upon.  That is the law of their rapport,—­not a theory, but a law, established by long, exhaustive, and conclusive experimentation.  The