192 SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION OF MECHANICS AND AETISANS. 



for each laborer. He saw at once the possibility of performing- this pro- 

 cess by machinery, and constructed a rude and imperfect model, worked 

 by hand, which turned out fifty pounds of the cleansed staple per day. 

 But he found in Georgia neither the workmen uor the materials for per- 

 fecting his invention or for multiplying his machines. It took him 

 years to get the manufacture well under way. Meanwhile, in the eager- 

 ness for the use of this wealth-yielding process, his j)ateut-rights were 

 ignored ; cotton-gins embodying his principle, with trivial variations, 

 were multiplied ; the interest of intrusive manufacturers and that of the 

 planters who adopted their contrivances, and thus laid themselves open 

 to legal prosecution, were arrayed against him, and elicited a strong- 

 public sentiment to his prejudice; sixty suits were instituted before he 

 obtained a single legal decision in his favor ; and his invention, which 

 at once raised the whole southern section of the country from thriftless 

 poverty to abounding opulence, was to him never worth the parchment 

 on which his patent was engrossed. 



Now the effect of institutes like yours is to replace the dioecious by 

 monoecious trees — to have the pollen and the fruit-buds grow on the 

 same stalk. You have here, students and graduates, all that careful 

 training can do for you to make you discoverers and inventors — to en- 

 able you both to initiate and to actualize industrial improvements, and to 

 reap, without hinderance or rivalry, your merited honor and recom- 

 pense. Moreover, nothing less than this training can put you on the 

 arena with the ])romise of success. No accurate jn^actical results can 

 be reached without the most exact calculations ; for, whether man 

 know, or be ignorant of, the laws of number and i^roportion, all sub- 

 stances and forces in nature obey them, and man masters nature only 

 by making- them his rule and measure. 



Your literary education here tends in the same direction. Especially 

 is this true of the command you acquire of the French language. He 

 who would contribute to the industrial advancement of mankind must 

 know what others have thought and done, how far each separate art 

 and science has advanced, what unsuccessful experiments have been 

 made and therefore need not be repeated, and in w'hat directions men of 

 learning and skill are looking for the new light of which thej'^ may uncon- 

 sciously be the harbingers ; and the French has been for more than a 

 century the mother-tongue of science and the useful arts, abounding 

 equally in encyclopedic works and in monographs, and i)resenting the 

 most advanced views in every department of physical philosophy and 

 of practical technology. 



^Yith these exercises of the school-room you have the education of 

 the workshop, far more systematic, comj^rehensive, and exact than 

 could fall to your lot under the best private auspices. You thus will 

 be j)repared to execute or direct your own plans, to embody your new 

 thought in wood, steel, or brass, and to insure for yourselves a fair 

 trial of whatever process or agency may seem to you an improvement 

 on the past. 



