Many were the wordy battles waged in the scientific world over the questions of priority, exclusive discovery or invention, indebtedness to others, and conscious or unconscious plagiarism. Some of these questions are, in many minds, not yet settled. Acrimonious were the legal struggles fought over infringements and rights of way, and, in the first years of the building of the lines to all parts of this country, real warfare was waged by the workers of competing companies. It is not my purpose to treat exhaustively of any of these battles, scientific, legal, or physical. All this has already been written down by abler pens than mine, and has now become history. My aim in following the career of Morse the Inventor is to shed a light (to some a new light) on his personality, self-revealed by his correspondence, tried first by hardships, poverty, and deep discouragement, and then by success, calumny, and fame. Like other men who have achieved greatness, he was made the target for all manner of abuse, accused of misappropriating the ideas of others, of lying, deceit, and treachery, and of unbounded conceit and vaingloriousness. But a careful study of his notes and correspondence, and the testimony of others, proves him to have been a pure-hearted Christian gentleman, earnestly desirous of giving to every one his just due, but jealous of his own good name and fame, and fighting valiantly, when needs must be, to maintain his rights; guilty sometimes of mistakes and errors of judgment; occasionally quick-tempered and testy under the stress of discouragement and the pressure of poverty, but frank to acknowledge his error and to make amends when convinced of his fault; and the calm verdict of posterity has awarded him the crown of greatness. Morse was now forty-one years old; he had spent three delightful years in France and Italy; had matured his art by the intelligent study of the best of the old masters; had made new friends and cemented more strongly the ties that bound him to old ones; and he was returning to his dearly loved native land and to his family with high hopes of gaining for himself and his three motherless children at least a competence, and of continuing his efforts in behalf of the fine arts. From Mr. Cooper's and Mr. Habersham's reminiscences we must conclude that, in the background of his mind, there existed a plan, unformed as yet, for utilizing electricity to convey intelligence. He was familiar with much that had been discovered with regard to that mysterious force, through his studies under Professors Day and Silliman at Yale, and through the lectures and conversation of Professors Dana and Renwick in New York, so that the charge which was brought against him that he knew absolutely nothing of the subject, can be dismissed as simply proving the ignorance of his critics.