In some cases, shoes had borne the heat of one summer, and melted the next.  The wagon-covers became sticky in the sun, and rigid in the cold.  The directors were at their wits’ end;—­since it required two years to test a new process, and meanwhile they knew not whether the articles made by it were valuable or worthless.  If they stopped manufacturing, that was certain ruin.  If they went on, they might find the product of a whole winter dissolving on their hands.  The capital of the Company was already so far exhausted, that, unless the true method were speedily discovered, it would be compelled to wind up its affairs.  The agent urged Mr. Goodyear not to waste time upon minor improvements, but to direct all his efforts to finding out the secret of successfully working the material itself.  The Company could not buy his improved inflator; but let him learn how to make an India-rubber that would stand the summer’s heat, and there was scarcely any price which it would not gladly give for the secret.

The worst apprehensions of the directors of this Company were realized.  The public soon became tired of buying India-rubber shoes that could only be saved during the summer by putting them into a refrigerator.  In the third year of the mania, India-rubber stock began to decline, and Roxbury itself finally fell to two dollars and a half.  Before the close of 1836, all the Companies had ceased to exist, their fall involving many hundreds of families in heavy loss.  The clumsy, shapeless shoes from South America were the only ones which the people would buy.  It was generally supposed that the secret of their resisting heat was that they were smoked with the leaves of a certain tree, peculiar to South America, and that nothing else in nature would answer the purpose.

The two millions of dollars lost by these Companies had one result which has proved to be worth many times that sum; it led Charles Goodyear to undertake the investigation of India-rubber.  That chance conversation with the agent of the Roxbury Company fixed his destiny.  If he were alive to read these lines, he would, however, protest against the use of such a word as chance in this connection.  He really appears to have felt himself “called” to study India-rubber.  He says himself:—­

“From the time that his attention was first given to the subject, a strong and abiding impression was made upon his mind, that an object so desirable and important, and so necessary to man’s comfort, as the making of gum-elastic available to his use, was most certainly placed within his reach.  Having this presentiment, of which he could not divest himself under the most trying adversity, he was stimulated with the hope of ultimately attaining this object.

“Beyond this he would refer the whole to the great Creator, who directs the operations of mind to the development of the properties of matter, in his own way, at the time when they are