and many were the expressions of
amazement from their lips. Some said, 'The world is coming to an end,'
as people will when it is really budding, and putting forth symptoms
of a larger life. Others exclaimed, 'Where will improvements and
discoveries stop?' and 'What would Jefferson think should he rise up and
witness what we have just seen?' One gentleman declared that, 'Time and
space are now annihilated.'

The practical outcome of the trial was that the Chairman reported a Bill
appropriating 30,000 dollars for the erection of an experimental line
between Washington and Baltimore. Mr. Smith was admitted to a fourth
share in the invention, and resigned his seat in Congress to become
legal adviser to the inventors. Claimants to the invention of the
telegraph now began to spring up, and it was deemed advisable for Mr.
Smith and Morse to proceed to Europe and secure the foreign patents.
Alfred Vail undertook to provide an instrument for exhibition in Europe.

Among these claimants was Dr. Jackson, chemist and geologist, of Boston,
who had been instrumental in evoking the idea of the telegraph in the
mind of Morse on board the Sully. In a letter to the NEW YORK OBSERVER
he went further than this, and claimed to be a joint inventor; but Morse
indignantly repudiated the suggestion. He declared that his instrument
was not mentioned either by him or Dr. Jackson at the time, and that
they had made no experiments together. 'It is to Professor Gale that I
am most of all indebted for substantial and effective aid in many of my
experiments,' he said; 'but he prefers no claim of any kind.'

Morse and Smith arrived in London during the month of June. Application
was immediately made for a British patent, but Cooke and Wheatstone and
Edward Davy, it seems, opposed it; and although Morse demonstrated that
his was different from theirs, the patent was refused, owing to a prior
publication in the London MECHANICS' MAGAZINE for February 18, 1838,
in the form of an article quoted from Silliman's AMERICAN JOURNAL OF
SCIENCE for October, 1837. Morse did not attempt to get this legal
disqualification set aside. In France he was equally unfortunate. His
instrument was exhibited by Arago at a meeting of the Institute, and
praised by Humboldt and Gay-Lussac; but the French patent law requires
the invention to be at work in France within two years, and when Morse
arranged to erect a telegraph line on the St. Germain Railway, the
Government decli