After our work was finished and I had gone home the awards were made public; to my astonishment the award to Mr. Sickels was not among them, so I wrote to General Walker, who was our medium of communication with the Commission, asking the reason for this omission. He replied that the award had been thrown out by the Committee of Revision. “Committee of Revision!” I had never heard of such a thing. I asked for an explanation and I learned that the judges did not make awards, they only recommended them; the awards were made by the Commission after they had passed the scrutiny of the Committee of Revision. Well, who were the Committee of Revision? I learned that the Commission consisted of two commissioners from each State appointed by the Governor; Mr. Corliss was a commissioner from Rhode Island. At a meeting of the commissioners Mr. Corliss proposed the novel scheme of a Committee of Revision, to which the action of the judges should be submitted for approval before the awards were made. The idea seemed to please the members of the Commission, as tending to magnify their own importance, and it was adopted; as a matter of usual courtesy Mr. Corliss was made chairman of the committee, and the committee threw out the award to Mr. Sickels. I made careful inquiry and could never learn that the Committee of Revision threw out any other award, so it seemed evident that with the throwing out of this award to Mr. Sickels the object of its existence was accomplished. In the Corliss valve system the liberation of the valve was the fundamental idea; this was applied by him to valves moving in the direction parallel with their seats. It not being necessary to arrest their motion at any precise point, they were caught by air cushions at any points after they had covered their ports. Mr. Corliss had appropriated the liberating idea, according to “the good old rule, the simple plan, that they may take who have the power, and they may keep who can,” and all this machinery had been devised by him to prevent the historical fact that the liberating idea had been invented by Mr. Sickels from appearing in the records of the exhibition. By all this enormous expenditure of ingenuity and influence he succeeded in giving to this fact a prominence and importance which it would never otherwise have had, besides advertising his efforts to suppress it.