Let anyone imagine the years on years of research that would have been necessary before Gilbert (who, after Thales, discovered electricity) could have perfected a system which would have enabled men to accomplish all that is accomplished in our age, with electricity as a motive power. Keely's labours would be better understood by those who accuse him of "always promising, and never performing," under such a conception. The inventor must be sanguine of success; he must day by day think that he is on the eve of perfecting his invention, in order to keep up his courage to persevere to the end; otherwise, how could he work, year after year, in the face of obstacle after obstacle that seems, each one, to be insurmountable? After Keely's imprisonment when, among the men who knew that he was incapable of fraud, there was one so incensed by Keely's repeated failures to perfect his engine that he had said he "hoped to live to see Keely rotting in a gutter," Mr. R. Harte wrote: "And now that it has been proved in a hundred ways and before thousands of persons competent to judge of the merits of Keely's claims, that he has really discovered previously unknown forces in nature, studied them, mastered some of their laws, invented and is perfecting researching apparatus that will make his discoveries of practical application in numerous ways--now that he has actually done this, how does the world treat him? Does Congress come forward with a grant to enable him to complete his marvellous work? Do men of science hail him as a great discoverer, or hold out the hand of fellowship? Do people do honour to the man whose sole entreaty to them will be to receive from his hands a gift a thousand times more precious to them than steam engine or dynamo? It is a literal fact that if Keely fell exhausted to-day, in the terrible struggle he has so long maintained, his failure to establish his claims would be received with a shout of malignant delight from nearly every lecture-hall, pulpit, counting-house and newspaper office in the so-called civilized world. The world has hardly ever recognized its benefactors until it has become time to raise a statue to their memory, 'in order to beautify the town.' Jealousy, stupidity, the malignity which is born of conscious inferiority, are at this moment putting in Keely's road every impediment which law and injustice can manufacture. Two hundred years ago he would have been burned, a century since he would have probably been mobbed to death; but thank God we are too civilized, too humane now to burn or mob to death those who make great discoveries, who wish to benefit their fellow-men, or whose ideas are in advance of their age--we only break their hearts with slander, ridicule, and neglect, and when that fails to drive them to suicide, we bring to bear upon them the ponderous pressure of the law, and heap upon them the 'peine forte et dure' of injunctions, and orders, and suits, to crush them out of a world they