d lines
of them are set up, to the North Frontiers and elsewhither. On an
Autumn evening of the Year Two, Far-writer having just written that
Conde Town has surrendered to us, we send from the Tuileries
Convention-Hall this response in the shape of a Decree: 'The name of
Conde is changed to _Nord-Libre_ (North Free). The Army of the North
ceases not to merit well of the country.' To the admiration of men!
For lo! in some half-hour, while the Convention yet debates, there
arrives this new answer: 'I inform thee (_Je t'annonce_), Citizen
President, that the Decree of Convention, ordering change of the name
Conde into North Free; and the other, declaring that the Army of the
North ceases not to merit well of the country, are transmitted and
acknowledged by Telegraph. I have instructed my Officer at Lille to
forward them to North Free by express.' Signed, Chappe."

This successful telegraph of Engineer Chappe was not an electric
telegraph, but a sunlight telegraph. Is it in reality any more
wonderful to use the electrical wave in the transmission of
intelligible symbols than to use a wave of light? Such seems to have
been the opinion of mankind; and the coming of the electric telegraph
was long postponed. The invention was made by slow approaches. In our
country the notion has prevailed that Morse did all--that others did
nothing; but this notion is very erroneous.

We are not to suppose that the Chappe method of telegraphing became
extinct after its first successful work. Other references to what we
_suppose_ to be the same instrument are found in the literature of the
age. The wonder is that more was not written and more accomplished by
the agency of Chappe's invention. In the fall of the year 1800,
General Bonaparte, who had been in Egypt and the East, returned to
Europe and landed at Frejus on his way to Paris, with the dream of
universal dominion in his head. In the first volume of the _Memoirs of
Napoleon Bonaparte_, his secretary M. de Bourrienne, writing of the
return to France says:

"We arrived in Paris on the 24th Vendemiaire (the sixteenth of
October). As yet he (Napoleon) knew nothing of what was going on; for
he had seen neither his wife nor his brothers, who were looking for
him on the Burgundy Road. The news of our landing at Frejus had
reached Paris _by a_ _telegraphic despatch_. Madame Bonaparte, who
was dining with M. Gohier when that despatch was communicated to him,
as President of the Directory, im