With the opening of the nineteenth century the development of the industries and of the inventive faculty of the Americans went on with enhanced rapidity. The century was but a few years old when Fulton, with his improved steamboat, solved the question of inland water transportation. By the end of the first quarter of the century this was solved in another way by the completion of the Erie Canal, the longest and hitherto the most valuable of artificial water-ways. The railroad locomotive, though invented in England, was prefigured when Oliver Evans' steam road-wagon ran sturdily through the streets of Philadelphia. To the same inventor we owe another triumph of American genius, the grain elevator, which the development of agriculture has rendered of incomparable value. The railroad, though not native here, has had here its greatest development, and with its more than one hundred and eighty thousand miles of length has no rival in any country upon the earth. To it may be added the Morse system of telegraphy, the telephone and phonograph, the electric light and electric motor, and all that wonderful series of inventions in electrical science which has been due to American genius. We cannot begin to name the multitude of inventions in the mechanical industries which have raised manufacture from an art to a science and filled the world with the multitude of its products. It will suffice to name among them the steam hammer, the sewing machine, the cylinder printing-press, the type-setting machine, the rubber vulcanizer, and the innumerable improvements in steam engines and labor-saving apparatus of all kinds. These manufacturing expedients have been equaled in number and importance by those applied to agriculture, including machines for plowing, reaping, sowing the seed, threshing the grain, cutting the grass, and a hundred other valuable processes, which have fairly revolutionized the art of tilling the earth, and enabled our farmers to feed not only our own population but to send millions of bushels of grain annually abroad. In truth, we have entered here upon an interminable field, so full of triumphs of invention and ingenuity, and so stupendous in its results, as to form one of the chief marvels of this wonderful century, and to place our nation, in the field of human industry and mechanical achievement, foremost among the nations of the world. Its triumphs have not been confined to manufacture and agriculture; it has been as active in commerce, and now stands first in the bulk of its exports and imports. In every other direction of industry it has been as active, as in fisheries, in forestry, in great works of engineering, in vast mining operations; and from the seas, the earth, the mountain sides, our laborers are wresting annually from nature a stupendous return in wealth.