f effort to elicit from Nature one of her deepest mysteries.
No one man, no one century, could have achieved it. It is the
child of the human race, the heir of all ages. How wonderful
are the steps that led to its creation! The very name of this
telegraphic instrument bears record of its history--Electric,
Magnetic.

"The first, named from the bit of yellow amber whose qualities
of attraction and repulsion were discovered by a Grecian philosopher
twenty-four centuries ago, and the second, from Magnesia, the
village of Asia Minor where first was found the lodestone, whose
touch turned the needle forever toward the north. These were
the earliest forms in which that subtle, all-pervading force revealed
itself to men. In the childhood of the race men stood dumb in the
presence of its more terrible manifestations. When it gleamed
in the purple aurora, or shot dusky-red from the clouds, it was
the eye-flash of an angry God before whom mortals quailed in helpless
fear."

More than three centuries ago, Shakespeare put into the mouth of
one of his creations the words,

"I'll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes."

The words spoken in jest were in the nature of a prophecy. After the
passing of many generations, in a country unknown to the great
bard, Morse, in the words of Mr. Cox, one of the most eloquent
of his eulogists--

"Gave to the universal people the means of speedy and accurate
intelligence, and so stormed at once the castles of the terrible
Giant Doubt and Giant Despair. He has saved time, shortened the
hours of toil, accumulated and intensified thought by the rapidity
and terseness of electric messages. He has celebrated treaties.
Go to the uttermost parts of the earth; go beneath the deep sea;
to the land where snows are eternal, or to the tropical realms
where the orange blooms in the air of mid-winter, and you will find
this clicking, persistent, sleepless instrument ready to give
its tireless wing to your purpose."

It was my good fortune to serve in the House of Representatives
with Mr. Stephens of Georgia, and Mr. Wood of New York, both of
whom more than a third of a century before had given their votes
in favor of the appropriation that made it possible for Morse to
prosecute experiments fraught with such stupendous blessing to our
race. The member who reported back the bill from the Committee on
Commerce, with favorable recommendations, and then supported it by
an eloque