We have seen that his introduction to India-rubber was through the medium of a life-preserver.  His last labors, also, were consecrated to life-saving apparatus, of which he invented or suggested a great variety.  His excellent wife was reading to him one evening, in London, an article from a review, in which it was stated that twenty persons perished by drowning every hour.  The company, startled at a statement so unexpected, conversed upon it for some time, while Mr. Goodyear himself remained silent and thoughtful.  For several nights he was restless, as was usually the case with him when he was meditating a new application of his material.  As these periods of incubation were usually followed by a prostrating sickness, his wife urged him to forbear, and endeavor to compose his mind to sleep.  “Sleep!” said he, “how can I sleep while twenty human beings are drowning every hour, and I am the man who can save them?” It was long his endeavor to invent some article which every man, woman, and child would necessarily wear, and which would make it impossible for them to sink.

He experimented with hats, cravats, jackets, and petticoats; and, though he left his principal object incomplete, he contrived many of those means of saving life which now puzzle the occupants of state-rooms.  He had the idea that every article on board a vessel seizable in the moment of danger, every chair, table, sofa, and stool, should be a life-preserver.

He returned to his native land a melancholy spectacle to his friends,—­yellow, emaciated, and feeble,—­but still devoted to his work.  He lingered and labored until July, 1860, when he died in New York, in the sixtieth year of his age.  Almost to the last day of his life he was busy with new applications of his discovery.  After twenty-seven years of labor and investigation, after having founded a new branch of industry, which gave employment to sixty thousand persons, he died insolvent, leaving to a wife and six children only an inheritance of debt.  Those who censure him for this should consider that his discovery was not profitable to himself for more than ten years, that he was deeply in debt when he began his experiments, that his investigations could be carried on only by increasing his indebtedness, that all his bargains were those of a man in need, that the guilelessness of his nature made him the easy prey of greedy, dishonorable men, and that his neglect of his private interests was due, in part, to his zeal for the public good.

Dr. Dutton of New Haven, his pastor and friend, in the Sermon dedicated to his memory, did not exaggerate when he spoke of him as