384 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



cable in mid-ocean was devised by Dr. James C. Palmer, of 

 Maryland. 



The limits of this article do not admit of giving a list of all 

 the Southern men who have made inventions of note. Some of 

 them are John Lawrence Smith, of South Carolina^ the celebrated 

 mineralogist and inventor of the inverted telescope ; " Sibley, of 

 Louisiana, and his conical tent ; Gibbs, of Virginia, and his sew- 

 ing machine; Janney, of Virginia, and his car coupler; Gorrie, 

 of Louisiana, and his ice machine; McComb, of Louisiana, and 

 his 'arrow' cotton tie; Gaynor, of Kentucky, and his fire tele- 

 graph ; Stone, of Missouri, and his grain roller mill ; Remberts, 

 of Texas, with his roller cotton compress ; Clarke, of Texas, with 

 his envelope machine, and Campbell, with his cotton picker; 

 Bonsack, of Virginia, with his cigarette machine ; Coffee, of Vir- 

 ginia, with his tobacco stemmer; Stevens, of Florida, with his 

 fruit wrapper ; Law, of Georgia, with his cotton planter ; Avery, 

 of Kentucky, with his plow sulky ; Watt and Starke, of Virginia, 

 with their plows ; McDonald, of our own day, with his fish lad- 

 ders and hatcheries, filling our streams with fish." Henry Draper, 

 a Virginian by birth, who removed to New York, made what has 

 been called "the most original discovery ever made in physical 

 science by an American." He was an authority upon telescopic 

 work, and his experiments in his specialty of celestial photogra- 

 phy led to the discovery of oxygen. in the sun by this means and 

 a new theory of the solar spectrum. 



In the practice of medicine the Southern physician was under 

 the disadvantage of having thinly populated country districts as 

 the field of his labors, and he lacked the benefits of association 

 and co-operation with those of his own calling that a city phy- 

 sician enjoys. But his isolated situation, as has been said of him, 

 often stimulated boldness of thought and original investigation. 

 Ephraim McDowell, M. D., a native of Rockbridge County, Va., 

 and who had moved to the little village of Danville, Ky., per- 

 formed here in 1809 the first operation on record for the extirpa- 

 tion of the ovary an announcement received with incredulity in 

 Europe, but the truth of which was established, and which won 

 for him the title of the " father of ovariotomy." Crawford W. 

 Long, M. D., a Georgian, performed in Jefferson County, his State, 

 on March 30, 1842, the first surgical operation on record, with the 

 patient in a state of anaesthesia, which was produced by the in- 

 halation of sulphuric ether. Of a like class of men was J. Marion 

 Sims, M. D., of Alabama, the pioneer in gynaecology and abdomi- 

 nal surgery. The eminent surgeon. Dr. Hunter McGuire, whose 

 position as Medical Director of Stonewall Jackson's corps. Army 

 of Northern Virginia, gave him exceptional opportunities of in- 

 formation, said of the surgeon in the Confederate army : " His 



