reating a part of these
and commanding the rest, he called into play an inventive genius, the
extent of which must always excite wonder and admiration.

Within ten years he created his own works, and invented and made his own
tools, invented and made his own machinery. More than this, he invented
and applied a wholly new principle of manufacture,--a principle that
has done more to advance human industry and increase wealth all over the
world than any other known effort of the human mind to solve material
problems. He invented and developed the principle or system of making
the various parts of a musket or any other complex manufactured
article, such as the sewing machine, so absolutely uniform as to be
interchangeable. This principle has been carried out in hundreds of
thousands of different ways. It has entered into and become a feature of
a vast range of manufactures. The principle was established by a series
of inventions as wonderful as any that the human mind ever conceived,
so that Whitney has been aptly called the Shakespeare of invention. His
inventions remain practically unchanged. After ninety years of trial,
they are found to be practically perfect.

It was his peculiar gift to be able to convey into inanimate machinery
the skill that a human being could acquire only after years of study and
practice.

It is almost like belittling the greatest of marvels to call it a
stroke of genius. He made it possible for the most ordinary laborer
to accomplish a hundred times as much in an hour, and with the most
exquisite perfection, as a skilled laborer could accomplish in a day.

On these wonderful inventions Whitney took out no patents. He gave them
all to the public. In this way he revenged himself on those who had
successfully robbed him of the fruits of his labor and genius in the
invention of the cotton gin. Perhaps if he had been more justly treated
in Georgia, he might have set up his works in this State, and this fact
might have made the South the seat of great manufacturing industries.
Who knows?

SOME GEORGIA INVENTIONS.

The credit of inventing the steamboat is by general consent given to
Robert Fulton. Every schoolboy is taught that such is the case, and yet
the fact is at least very doubtful. There is preserved among the papers
in the Archives of Georgia a document that indicates, that, while Robert
Fulton has won the credit for an invention that has revolutionized
the commerce of the world, t