same that is borne to us in the fragrance of flowers planted on the graves of our dead.  It is the common hydrogen and carbon and oxygen and nitrogen of our earth and its envelope.  It is the soda of our bread; the potassa of our ashes; the phosphorus of our bones and brain!  Indeed, the universe throughout is of one form and one substance, and there is one Father over all.  Sooner or later the concepts of science and of religion will come together; and the small agitations and conflicts of human thought and hope will pass away in a sublime unity of human faith.

Progress in Discovery and Invention.

THE FIRST STEAMBOAT AND ITS MAKER.

On the night of the second of July, 1798, a man at a little old tavern in Bardstown, Kentucky, committed suicide.  If ever there was a justifiable case of self-destruction, it was this.  No human being is permitted to take his own life, but there are instances in which the burden of existence becomes well-nigh intolerable.  In the case just mentioned, the man went to his room and took poison.  He was a little more than fifty-five years of age, but was prematurely old from the hardships to which he had been subjected.  He had not a penny.  His clothes were worn out.  A dirty shirt, made of coarse materials, was seen through the rags of his coat.  His face was haggard, wrinkled, written all over with despair, the lines of which not even the goodness of death was able to dispel.

The man had seen the Old World and the New, but had never seen happiness.  He had followed his forlorn destiny from his native town of South Windsor, Connecticut, where he was born on the twenty-first of January, 1743.  His body was buried in the graveyard of Bardstown, then a frontier village.  No one contributed a stone to mark the grave.  Nor has that duty ever been performed.  The spot became undistinguishable as time went by, and we believe that there is not a man in the world who can point out the place where the body of John Fitch was buried.  The grave of the inventor of the steamboat, hidden away, more obscurely than that of Jean Valjean in the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise, will keep the heroic bones to the last day, when all sepulchres of earth shall set free their occupants and the great sea’s wash cast up its dead!

The life of John Fitch is, we are confident, the saddest chapter in human biography.  The soul of the man seems from the first to have gone forth darkly voyaging, like Poe’s raven,

                               —­“Whom unmerciful disaster
    Followed fast and followed faster, till his song one burden bore,
    Till the dirges of his hope the melancholy burden bore,—­
    Of ‘Nevermore—­nevermore!’”

Certainly it was nevermore with him.  His early years were made miserable by ill-treatment and abuse.  His father, a close-fisted farmer and an elder brother of the same character, converted the boyhood life of John Fitch into a long day of grief and humiliation and a long night of gloomy dreams.  Then at length came an ill-advised and ill-starred marriage, which broke under him and left him to wander forth in desolation.