Upon the half-shell were served some remarkable mechanical inventions. Water raised into steam was, in 1806, applied by Fulton to propel the first steamboat over water; an application never contemplated by the Constitution, but which, in spite of the many private constitutions suddenly broken up by it, the appalling increase in American biographies, and the wreck of matter thrown upon life-insurance reserves, must be kindly remembered as one of the great benefactions of genius to humanity. In 1832 Samuel F. B. Morse discovered the mode of electro-magnetizing thought, and of ticking down words at places where thoughts were seldom spontaneously produced. The wiry telegraph is daily bringing to light other incidental discoveries, which show how great benefits sometimes pendulate with petty remorses. There are developed at most stations a class of people, formerly unknown, and called “operators,” who believe that small accidents, in places unrewarded by the notice of geographers, are national; that the births, deaths, or marriages of owners of petroleum, fast horses, or other rapid stock, concern all readers of newspapers; that the time, age, and pedigree of quadrupeds, kept for jumping long spaces in a short time, and the weights of bipeds, sent to college to acquire an increase of their intellectual strength, but who punish instead an ash stick some four hours a day, by sweeping with it some frog-pond in the vicinity, are vital statistics; and that the election of constables, supervisors, aldermen, mayors, and members of Congress are matters which every intelligent patriot, instead of banishing from all recollection as speedily as possible, desires to have forced upon his journalistic readings. If Morse started, re-morse has often followed after, the telegraph. In 1833, one Hussey, from Cincinnati, improving upon hints glinting out through agricultural books and poems from the time of the Romans, perfected somewhat a mower and reaper, which, as since bettered by Manny, Ketchum, and McCormick, has made such quick work with our meadows and grain-fields, as to break up all the delicious reveries into which picturesque men in them, and sentimentalists over books representing them, formerly indulged. Gone is the mower’s scythe, now nicked into the quick-sliding saw which eats in a day through acres of grass and golden-bloomed wheat. Gone, Ruth-lessly, the maidens in broad hats, turning with a fork the low-lying clover, and with their eyes the uncut young Timothy, ever near at hand. Vanished from American harvest-fields the whistling grain-gatherers, driven from sight and pictorial illustrations by a single hussy.