He who now passes along the streets of the metropolis will come upon a vendor of toys, who will drop upon the pavement an artificial miniature tortoise, rabbit, rat, or what not, well wound up; and the creature will begin to crawl, or dance, or jump, or run, according to its nature.  The busy, conservative man smiles a superior smile, and passes on.  It was in such mood that the old New Yorker of 1796 witnessed the going of Fitch’s little screw propeller on the Pond.  It was a toy of the water.

After this the poor spectre left for the West.  The spring of 1798 found him at Bardstown, with the model of a little three-foot steamboat, which he launched on a neighboring stream.  There he still told his neighbors that the time would come when all rivers and seas would be thus navigated.  But they heeded not.  The spectre became more spectral.  At last, about the beginning of July, in the year just named, he gave up the battle, crept into his room at the little old tavern, took his poison, and fell into the final sleep.

We shall conclude this sketch of him and his work with one of his own sorrowful prophecies:  “The day will come,” said he in a letter, “when some more powerful man will get fame and riches from my invention; but nobody will believe that poor John Fitch can do anything worthy of attention.”  Than this there is, we think, hardly a more pathetic passage in the history of the sons of men!

TELEGRAPHING BEFORE MORSE.

There is a great fallacy in the judgment of mankind about the method of the coming of new things.  People imagine that new things come all at once, but they do not.  Nothing comes all at once; that is, no thing.  In the facts of the natural world, that is, among visible phenomena of the landscape, the judgment of people is soon corrected.  There it is seen that everything grows.  The growth is sometimes slow and sometimes rapid; but everything comes gradually out of its antecedents.  No tree or shrub or flower ever came immediately.  No living creature on the face of the earth begins by instantaneous apparition.  The chick gets out of its shell presently, but even that takes time.  Every living thing comes on by degrees from a germ, and the germ is generally microscopic!  Nature is, indeed, a marvel!

The facts of human life, whether tangible or intangible, have this same method.  For example, there has not been an invention known to mankind that has not come on in the manner of growth.  The antecedents of it work on and on in a tentative way, producing first this trial result and then that, always approaching the true thing; and even the true thing when it comes is not perfect.  It is made perfect afterward.  There was never an instantaneous invention, and there was never a complete one!  It is doubtful whether there is at the present time a single complete, that is perfect or perfected, invention in the world.  They are all of partial development.  They show in their history their origin, their growth, their gradual approximation to the perfect form.