the attention of American experimenters.  The Europeans succeeded in rendering it useful because they did not attempt too much.  The French cut the imported sheets of gum into shreds, without ever attempting to produce the sheets themselves.  Mackintosh exposed no surface of India-rubber to the air, and brought no surfaces of India-rubber into contact.  No one had discovered any process by which India-rubber once dissolved could be restored to its original consistency.  Some of our readers may have attempted, twenty years ago, to fill up the holes in the sole of an India-rubber shoe.  Nothing was easier than to melt a piece of India-rubber for the purpose; but, when applied to the shoe, it would not harden.  There was the grand difficulty, the complete removal of which cost so much money and so many years.

The ruinous failure of the first American manufacturers arose from the fact that they began their costly operations in ignorance of the existence of this difficulty.  They were too fast.  They proceeded in the manner of the inventor of the caloric engine, who began by placing one in a ship of great magnitude, involving an expenditure which ruined the owners.

It was in the year 1820 that a pair of India-rubber shoes was seen for the first time in the United States.  They were covered with gilding, and resembled in shape the shoes of a Chinaman.  They were handed about in Boston only as a curiosity.  Two or three years after, a ship from South America brought to Boston five hundred pairs of shoes, thick, heavy, and ill-shaped, which sold so readily as to invite further importations.  The business increased until the annual importation reached half a million pairs, and India-rubber shoes had become an article of general use.  The manner in which these shoes were made by the natives of South America was frequently described in the newspapers, and seemed to present no difficulty.  They were made much as farmers’ wives, made candles.  The sap being collected from the trees, clay lasts were dipped into the liquid twenty or thirty times, each layer being smoked a little.  The shoes were then hung up to harden for a few days; after which the clay was removed, and the shoes were stored for some months to harden them still more.  Nothing was more natural than to suppose that Yankees could do this as well as Indians, if not far better.  The raw India-rubber could then be bought in Boston for five cents a pound, and a pair of shoes made of it brought from three to five dollars.  Surely here was a promising basis for a new branch of manufacture in New England.  It happened too, in 1830, that vast quantities of the raw gum reached the United States.  It came covered with hides, in masses, of which no use could be made in America; and it remained unsold, or was sent to Europe.