and elbow-joints, can intelligibly signal; and lines of them are set up, to the North Frontiers and elsewhither.  On an Autumn evening of the Year Two, Far-writer having just written that Conde Town has surrendered to us, we send from the Tuileries Convention-Hall this response in the shape of a Decree:  ’The name of Conde is changed to Nord-Libre (North Free).  The Army of the North ceases not to merit well of the country.’  To the admiration of men!  For lo! in some half-hour, while the Convention yet debates, there arrives this new answer:  ’I inform thee (Je t’annonce), Citizen President, that the Decree of Convention, ordering change of the name Conde into North Free; and the other, declaring that the Army of the North ceases not to merit well of the country, are transmitted and acknowledged by Telegraph.  I have instructed my Officer at Lille to forward them to North Free by express.’  Signed, Chappe.”

This successful telegraph of Engineer Chappe was not an electric telegraph, but a sunlight telegraph.  Is it in reality any more wonderful to use the electrical wave in the transmission of intelligible symbols than to use a wave of light?  Such seems to have been the opinion of mankind; and the coming of the electric telegraph was long postponed.  The invention was made by slow approaches.  In our country the notion has prevailed that Morse did all—­that others did nothing; but this notion is very erroneous.

We are not to suppose that the Chappe method of telegraphing became extinct after its first successful work.  Other references to what we suppose to be the same instrument are found in the literature of the age.  The wonder is that more was not written and more accomplished by the agency of Chappe’s invention.  In the fall of the year 1800, General Bonaparte, who had been in Egypt and the East, returned to Europe and landed at Frejus on his way to Paris, with the dream of universal dominion in his head.  In the first volume of the Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, his secretary M. de Bourrienne, writing of the return to France says: 

“We arrived in Paris on the 24th Vendemiaire (the sixteenth of October).  As yet he (Napoleon) knew nothing of what was going on; for he had seen neither his wife nor his brothers, who were looking for him on the Burgundy Road.  The news of our landing at Frejus had reached Paris by a telegraphic despatch.  Madame Bonaparte, who was dining with M. Gohier when that despatch was communicated to him, as President of the Directory, immediately set off to meet her husband,” etc.  We should be glad to know in what particular form that “telegraphic despatch” was delivered!  But such are Bourrienne’s words!