While to this energetic man is due the actual success, it is to Professor Morse, who had said that “telegraphic communication might with certainty be established across the Atlantic Ocean,” and to an excellent Roman Catholic bishop, that the idea is to be fairly credited. Bishop Mullock, of Newfoundland, while lying becalmed in his yacht off Cape North, the extreme point of the province of Cape Breton, bethought himself how his poor neglected island might reap some advantage from being taken into the track of communication between Europe and America, for he saw that Nature had provided an easy approach to the mainland for a cable. Fired with the idea, he wrote to one of the St. John’s papers, and his letter is to‐day a model of lucid explanation. About the same time Mr. Frederick N. Gisborne, a practical telegraph operator, promulgated the idea of connecting St. John’s with the mainland, and one evening interested Mr. Cyrus Field, then just retired from business on a competency, in his scheme. “After he left,” writes his brother, “Mr. Field took the globe which was standing in the library, and began to turn it over. It was while thus studying the globe that the idea first occurred to him that the telegraph might be carried further still, and be made to span the Atlantic Ocean.” Maury, the distinguished marine scientist, and Professor Morse, had also come to the same conclusion, and at about the same time as had others in England. The history of the financial difficulties and ultimate triumphs connected with the inauguration of the first cable would not interest the reader; suffice it to say that half‐a‐dozen New York millionaires subscribed the first capital—a million and a half dollars. The cable across the Gulf of St. Lawrence was successfully laid in 1856, after one previous failure.