August 23._ To-day I went to Potsdam to see Baron Humboldt, and had a
delightful interview with this wonderful man. Although I had met with him
at the soirees of Baron Gerard, the distinguished painter, in Paris in
1822, and afterward at the Academy of Sciences, when my Telegraph was
exhibited to the assembled academicians in 1838, I took letters of
introduction to him from Baron Gerolt, the Prussian Minister. But they
were unnecessary, for the moment I entered his room, which is in the
Royal Palace, he called me by name and greeted me most kindly, saying, as
I presented my letters: 'Oh! sir, you need no letters, your name is a
sufficient introduction'; and so, seating myself, he rapidly touched upon
various topics relating to America."

On the margin of a photograph of himself, presented to Morse by the
baron, is an inscription in French of which the following is a
translation:--

To Mr. S.F.B. Morse, whose philosophic and useful labors have rendered
his name illustrious in two worlds, the homage of the high and
affectionate esteem of Alexander Humboldt.

POTSDAM, August 1856.

The next thirty days were spent in showing the beauties of Cologne,
Aix-la-Chapelle, Brussels and Paris to his wife and niece, and in the
latter part of September the little party returned to London. Here Morse
resumed his experiments with Dr. Whitehouse and Mr. Bright, and on
October 3, he reports to Mr. Field:--

"As the electrician of the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph
Company, it is with the highest gratification that I have to apprise you
of the result of our experiments of this morning upon a single continuous
conductor of more than two thousand miles in extent, a distance, you will
perceive, sufficient to cross the Atlantic Ocean from Newfoundland to
Ireland.

"The admirable arrangements made at the Magnetic Telegraph office in Old
Broad Street for connecting ten subterranean gutta-percha insulated
conductors of over two hundred miles each, so as to give one continuous
length of more than two thousand miles, during the hours of the night
when the Telegraph is not commercially employed, furnished us the means
of conclusively settling by actual experiment the question of the
practicability as well as the practicality of telegraphing through our
proposed Atlantic cable.... I am most happy to inform you that, as a
crowning result of a long series of experimental investigation and
inductive reasoning upon this subject, the