He was evidently a laborious, conscientious, modest man, neither learned nor highly gifted, but making no pretence to learning or gifts, doing the work which fell to him with all his might, and with a perseverance never surpassed in all the history of invention and discovery.  Who would have thought to find a romance in the history of India-rubber?  We are familiar with the stories of poor and friendless men, possessed with an idea and pursuing their object, amid obloquy, neglect, and suffering, to the final triumph; of which final triumph other men reaped the substantial reward, leaving to the discoverer the barren glory of his achievement,—­and that glory obscured by detraction.  Columbus is the representative man of that illustrious order.  We trust to be able to show that Charles Goodyear is entitled to a place in it.  Whether we consider the prodigious and unforeseen importance of his discovery, or his scarcely paralleled devotion to his object, in the face of the most disheartening obstacles, we feel it to be due to his memory, to his descendants, and to the public, that his story should be told.  Few persons will ever see his book, of which only a small number of copies were printed for private circulation.  Still fewer will be at the pains to pick out the material facts from the confused mass of matter in which they are hidden.  Happily for our purpose, no one now has an interest to call his merits in question.  He rests from his labors, and the patent, which was the glory and misery of his life, has expired.

Our great-grandfathers knew India-rubber only as a curiosity, and our grandfathers only as a means of erasing pencil-marks.  The first specimens were brought to Europe in 1730; and as late as 1770 it was still so scarce an article, that in London it was only to be found in one shop, where a piece containing half a cubic inch was sold for three shillings.  Dr. Priestley, in his work on perspective, published in 1770, speaks of it as a new article, and recommends its use to draughtsmen.  This substance, however, being one of those of which nature has provided an inexhaustible supply, greater quantities found their way into the commerce of the world; until, in 1820, it was a drug in all markets, and was frequently brought as ballast merely.  About this time it began to be subjected to experiments with a view to rendering it available in the arts.  It was found useful as an ingredient of blacking and varnish.  Its elasticity was turned to account in France in the manufacture of suspenders and garters,—­threads of India-rubber being inserted in the web.  In England, Mackintosh invented his still celebrated water-proof coats, which are made of two thin cloths with a paste of India-rubber between them.  In chemistry, the substance was used to some extent, and its singular properties were much considered.  In England and France, the India-rubber manufacture had attained considerable importance before the material had attracted