shed in the Atlantic Monthly for
October, 1858, just at the time that the first Atlantic Cable,
whose first prattle had been welcomed by the acclamations of a
continent, gasped its last under the manipulations of De Sauty. It
has since been copied by Mr. Prescott in his valuable hand-book of
the electric telegraph.

The war, which has taught us all so much, has given a brilliant
illustration of the dot and line alphabet, wholly apart from the
electric use of it, which will undoubtedly be often repeated. In
the movements of our troops under General Foster in North Carolina,
Dr. J. B. Upham of Boston, the distinguished medical director in
that department, equally distinguished for the success with which
he has led forward the musical education of New England, trained a
corps of buglers to converse with each other by long and short
bugle-notes, and thus to carry information with literal accuracy
from point to point at any distance within which the tones of a
bugle could be heard. It will readily be seen that there are many
occasions in military affairs when such means of conversation might
prove of inestimable value. Mr. Tuttle, the astronomer, on duty in
the same campaign, made a similar arrangement with long and short
flashes of light.]

Just in the triumph week of that Great Telegraph which takes its name
from the Atlantic Monthly, I read in the September number of that
journal the revelations of an observer who was surprised to find that he
had the power of reading, as they run, the revelations of the wire. I
had the hope that he was about to explain to the public the more general
use of this instrument,--which, with a stupid fatuity, the public has as
yet failed to grasp. Because its signals have been first applied by
means of electro-magnetism, and afterwards by means of the chemical
power of electricity, the many-headed people refuses to avail itself, as
it might do very easily, of the same signals for the simpler
transmission of intelligence, whatever the power employed.

The great invention of Mr. Morse is his register and alphabet. He
himself eagerly disclaims any pretension to the original conception of
the use of electricity as an errand-boy. Hundreds of people had thought
of that and suggested it; but Morse was the first to give the errand-boy
such a written message, that he could not lose it on the way, nor