Whenever a group of the early acquaintances of Dr. Mateer talked together about him, one thing certain to be mentioned was his achievements with apparatus and machinery, both with the making and with the using of them. Out in China his reputation for this was so great that it at times came near to being a burden to him. We have already seen that the temporary superintendence of the mission press at Shanghai was thrust upon him, contrary to his own preference, and because, as he expressed it in a letter at that time, the men in control considered him a “Jack-of-all-trades,” able to do anything at which he might be put. If they then did really think of him as no more than a man who with machinery could do a great many things without performing any of them thoroughly well, they did him a great injustice, which their subsequent knowledge amply corrected. As the years went by, and in this sphere of his multifarious activity he rose to larger and more difficult achievements, his fame as to this spread far and wide among both natives and foreigners. At no time, however, did he permit his efficiency in this line to loom up in such a form or in such a degree as to seem even to others to put his distinctively missionary labors into the background. It is a significant fact that in the eulogiums pronounced on him at his death this feature of his character and work is seldom even mentioned. He was—first, last, and all the time—a man whose life and whose abilities were so completely and so manifestly consecrated to the evangelization of the Chinese that when those who knew him best looked back over the finished whole, his remarkable achievements with apparatus and machinery scarcely arrested their attention.