pain of seeing a later pioneer get credit for a discovery he thought his own. In 1798 he died--of an overdose of morphine--leaving behind the bitter writing: "The day will come when some powerful man will get fame and riches from my invention; but nobody will ever believe that poor John Fitch can do anything worthy of attention." In trying to make amends for the long injustice done to poor Fitch, modern history has come near to going beyond justice. It is undoubted that Fitch applied steam to the propulsion of a boat, long before Fulton, but that Fitch himself was the first inventor is not so certain. Blasco de Garay built a rude steamboat in Barcelona in 1543; in Germany one Papin built one a few years later, which bargemen destroyed lest their business be injured by it. Jonathan Hulls, of Liverpool, in 1737 built a stern-wheeler, rude engravings of which are still in existence, and Symington in 1801 built a thoroughly practical steamboat at Dundee. 'Tis a vexed question, and perhaps it is well enough to say that Fitch first scented the commercial possibilities of steam navigation, while Fulton actually developed them--the one "raised" the fox, while the other was in at the death. To trace a great idea to the actual birth is apt to be obstructive to national pride. It is even said that the Chinese of centuries ago understood the value of the screw-propeller--for inventing which our adoptive citizen Ericsson stands in bronze on New York's Battery. From the time of Robert Fulton, at any rate, dates the commercial usage of the steamboat. Others had done the pioneering--Fitch on the Delaware, James Rumsey on the Potomac, William Longstreet on the Savannah, Elijah Ormsley on the waters of Rhode Island, while Samuel Morey had actually traveled by steamboat from New Haven to New York. Fulton's craft was not materially better than any of these, but it happened to be launched on ----that tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. But the flood of that tide did not come to Fulton without long waiting and painstaking preparation. He was the son of an Irish immigrant, and born in Pennsylvania in 1765. To inventive genius he added rather unusual gifts for drawing and painting; for a time followed the calling of a painter of miniatures and went to London to study under Benjamin West, whom all America of that day thought a genius scarcely second to Raphael or Titian. He was not, like poor Fitch, doomed to the narrowest poverty and shut out from the society of the men of light and learning of the day, for we find him, after his London experience, a member of the family of Joel Barlow, then our minister to France. By this time his ambition had forsaken art for mechanics, and he was deep in plans for diving boats, submarine torpedoes, and steamboats. Through various channels he succeeded in getting his plan for moving vessels with steam, before Napoleon--then First Consul--who ordered the Minister of Marine to treat with the inventor. The Minister in due time suggested that 10,000 francs be spent on experiments to be made in the Harbor of Brest. To this Napoleon