introduction
to our present investigation:

It is foolish to suppose that all things are known to us.

True wisdom involves continual study.

In the month of June, 1776, a young man, the Marquis de
Jouffroy, was experimenting upon the Doubs,[1] with a steamboat
forty feet long by six feet wide. For two years he had been
inviting scientific attention to his invention; for two years he
had insisted that steam was a powerful force, heretofore
unappreciated. All ears remained deaf to his voice. Complete
isolation was his sole recompense. When he walked through the
streets of Beaume-les-Dames, a thousand jests greeted his
appearance. They nicknamed him Jouffroy the Pump. Ten years
later, having constructed a _pyroscaphe_ [steamboat] which
voyaged along the Saone, from Lyons to Isle Barbe, Jouffroy
presented a petition to Cabinet Minister Calonne and to the
Academy of Sciences. They refused even to look at his invention.

[1] The Doubs is a stream after which one of the Eastern
Departments of France is named. Its principal city is
Besancon, the birthplace of Victor Hugo.

On August 9, 1803, Robert Fulton, the American, ascended the
Seine in a novel steamboat, at a speed of six kilometers per
hour. The Academy of Sciences and the government officials
witnessed the experiment. On the tenth they had forgotten him,
and Fulton departed to try his fortunes with his own countrymen.

In 1791 an Italian, named Galvani, suspended from the bars of
his window at Bologna some flayed frogs, which he that morning
had seen in motion on a table, although they had been killed the
night before. This incident seemed incredible, and was
unanimously rejected by those to whom he related it. Learned men
would have considered it below their dignity to take any pains
to verify his story, so sure were they of its impossibility.
Galvani, however, had noticed that the maximum effect was
produced when a metallic arc, of tin and copper, was brought
into contact with the lumbar nerves and pedal extremities of a
frog. Then the animal would be violently convulsed. The observer
believed this came from a nervous fluid, and so he lost the
advantage of his observations. It was reserved for Volta to
really discover electricity.

Yet already Europe is furrowed by wagons drawn by flame-mouthed