constructed the engine as at present in use. At the same time, every
credit is due to Mr. Miller, who first afforded Symington the
opportunity of putting his ingenuity to the test.

[Illustration: HUDSON RIVER STEAMER.]

Let us now look at Mr. Fulton's part in the transaction. In 1801 he
visited Scotland, and was present at one of the experiments making by
Symington on the canal, and from him he obtained permission to make full
sketches and notes of both boat and apparatus. The fact is sworn to on
oath of the presence of an American gentleman, who called himself Mr.
Fulton, during the experiments; and further evidence is found in the
fact that the engines he ordered of Messrs. Boulton and Watt for the
"Clermont" were precisely of the same dimensions as those in the
"Charlotte Dundas," with the exception of two inches more diameter in
the piston; and the patent of Fulton dates from 1809--twenty years after
Symington had propelled a boat by steam on Lake Dalswinton, and eight
years after he had himself taken sketches of Symington's engines in the
Forth and Clyde canal-boat.

Beyond the foregoing evidence, there is the testimony of Mr. Bell that,
at Fulton's request, he sent him information, plans, &c., of Mr.
Miller's first experiments. The long and the short of the story is
clearly this:--Mr. Fulton was a shrewd and clever engineer. He came to
England, copied the steam-engine which Symington had combined--one can
hardly say invented--and then returned to his own country, and applied
it successfully, for which the Republic ought to be thankful to him, and
to honour his name; but, for a president of a college lecturing before a
mechanics' society, to call Fulton the inventor "of applying a known
force _in a new manner and to new and before unthought-of purposes,"_
exhibits an ignorance or an assurance, for neither of which the
slightest excuse can be made.[CJ]

With equal accuracy Mr. King informs the mechanics that "Colonel John
Stevens had clearly worked out in his own mind, long before any
locomotive was constructed in Europe, the theory of such an application
of steam, and the actual form in which it could be advantageously made,
as well as the cost of constructing and working a railway for the use of
locomotives." If this were true, how does it happen that the son of the
Colonel, an able and ingenious mechanician, came over to George
Stephenson, at Liverpool, to learn what he was doing, and to order
engines from