"In person Professor Morse was tall, slender, graceful, and attractive. Six feet in stature, he stood erect and firm, even in old age. His blue eyes were expressive of genius and affection. His nature was a rare combination of solid intellect and delicate sensibility. Thoughtful, sober, and quiet, he readily entered into the enjoyments of domestic and social life, indulging in sallies of humor, and readily appreciating and greatly enjoying the wit of others. Dignified in his intercourse with men, courteous and affable with the gentler sex, he was a good husband, a judicious father, a generous and faithful friend. He had the misfortune to incur the hostility of men who would deprive him of the merit and the reward of his labors. But his was the common fate of great inventors. He lived until his rights were vindicated by every tribunal to which they could be referred, and acknowledged by all civilized nations. And he died leaving to his children a spotless and illustrious name, and to his country the honor of having given birth to the only electro-magnetic recording telegraph whose line has gone out through all the earth and its words to the end of the world." [Illustration: Charles Goodyear.] VI. CHARLES GOODYEAR. India-rubber had been known for more than a hundred years when Charles Goodyear undertook to make of it thousands of articles useful in common life. So long ago as 1735 a party of French astronomers discovered in Peru a curious tree that yielded the natives a peculiar gum or sap which they collected in clay vessels. This sap became hard when exposed to the sun, and was used by the natives, who made different articles of every-day use from it by dipping a clay mould again and again into the liquid. When the article was completed the clay mould was broken to pieces and shaken out. In this manner they made a kind of rough shoe and an equally rough bottle. In some parts of South America the natives presented their guests with these bottles, which served as syringes for squirting water. Articles thus made were liable to become stiff and unmanageable in cold weather and soft and sticky in warm. Upon getting back to France the travellers directed the attention of scientists to this remarkable gum, which was afterward found in various parts of South America, and the chief supplies of which still come from Brazil. About the beginning of the present century this substance, known variously as cachuchu, caoutchouc, gum-elastic, and india-rubber, was first commercially introduced into Europe. It was regarded merely as a curiosity, chiefly useful for erasing pencil-marks. Ships from South America took it over as ballast. About the year 1820 it began to be used in France in the manufacture of suspenders and garters, india-rubber threads being mixed with the material used in weaving those articles. Some years later Mackintosh, an English manufacturer, used it in his famous water-proof coats, which were made by spreading a layer of the