with such a burial.

True, Dr. Lardner had "proved" to scientific men that a steamship could
not cross the Atlantic, but in 1810 the _Savannah_ from New York
appeared off the coast of Ireland under sail and steam, having made
this "impossible" passage. Those on shore thought that a fire had
broken out below the decks, and a king's cutter was sent to her relief.
Although the voyage was made without accident, it was nearly twenty
years before it was admitted that steam navigation could be made a
commercial success in ocean traffic.

As Junius Smith impatiently paced the deck of a vessel sailing from an
English port to New York, on a rough and tedious voyage in 1832, he
said to himself, "Why not cross the ocean regularly in steamships?" In
New York and in London a deaf ear was turned to any such nonsense.
Smith's first encouragement came from George Grote, the historian and
banker, who said the idea was practicable; but it was the same old
story,--he would risk no money in it. At length Isaac Selby, a
prominent business man of London, agreed to build a steamship of two
thousand tons, the _British Queen_. An unexpected delay in fitting the
engines led the projectors to charter the _Sirius_, a river steamer of
seven hundred tons, and send her to New York. Learning of this, other
parties started from Bristol four days later in the _Great Western_,
and both vessels arrived at New York the same day. Soon after Smith
made the round trip between London and New York in thirty-two days.

What a sublime picture of determination and patience was that of
Charles Goodyear, of New Haven, buried in poverty and struggling with
hardships for eleven long years, to make India rubber of practical use!
See him in prison for debt; pawning his clothes and his wife's jewelry
to get a little money to keep his children (who were obliged to gather
sticks in the field for fire) from starving. Watch his sublime courage
and devotion to his idea, when he had no money to bury a dead child and
when his other five were near starvation; when his neighbors were
harshly criticizing him for his neglect of his family and calling him
insane. But, behold his vulcanized rubber; the result of that heroic
struggle, applied to over five hundred uses by 100,000 employees.

What a pathetic picture was that of Palissy, plodding on through want
and woe to rediscover the lost art of enameling pottery; building his
furnaces with bricks carried on his back, seein