veral nights he was
restless, as was usually the case with him when he was meditating a
new application of his material. As these periods of incubation were
usually followed by a prostrating sickness, his wife urged him to
forbear, and endeavor to compose his mind to sleep. "Sleep!" said he,
"how can I sleep while twenty human beings are drowning every hour,
and I am the man who can save them?" It was long his endeavor to
invent some article which every man, woman, and child would
necessarily wear, and which would make it impossible for them to sink.

He experimented with hats, cravats, jackets, and petticoats; and,
though he left his principal object incomplete, he contrived many of
those means of saving life which now puzzle the occupants of
state-rooms. He had the idea that every article on board a vessel
seizable in the moment of danger, every chair, table, sofa, and stool,
should be a life-preserver.

He returned to his native land a melancholy spectacle to his
friends,--yellow, emaciated, and feeble,--but still devoted to his
work. He lingered and labored until July, 1860, when he died in New
York, in the sixtieth year of his age. Almost to the last day of his
life he was busy with new applications of his discovery. After
twenty-seven years of labor and investigation, after having founded a
new branch of industry, which gave employment to sixty thousand
persons, he died insolvent, leaving to a wife and six children only an
inheritance of debt. Those who censure him for this should consider
that his discovery was not profitable to himself for more than ten
years, that he was deeply in debt when he began his experiments, that
his investigations could be carried on only by increasing his
indebtedness, that all his bargains were those of a man in need, that
the guilelessness of his nature made him the easy prey of greedy,
dishonorable men, and that his neglect of his private interests was
due, in part, to his zeal for the public good.

Dr. Dutton of New Haven, his pastor and friend, in the Sermon
dedicated to his memory, did not exaggerate when he spoke of him as

"one who recognized his peculiar endowment of inventive
genius as a divine gift, involving a special and defined
responsibility, and considered himself called of God, as was
Bezaleel, to that particular course of invention to which he
devoted the chief part of his life. This he often expressed,
though with his characteristi