INVENTION AND INDUSTRY AT THE SOUTH. 383 



doing away with the system of African slavery, for which, though 

 the South was not responsible, it having been fastened upon her 

 by the greed of England and New England, yet which blighted 

 her industries and made her isolated in her modes of thought and 

 out of touch with the world at large. 



Despite the fact that the people of the South were but little 

 engaged in scientific or mechanical pursuits, and that their intel- 

 lectual energies have for the most part been absorbed with other 

 thoughts, yet many notable inventions and contributions to sci- 

 ence have been made by Southern men. Cyrus H. McCormick, a 

 native of Rockbridge County, Va., and the inventor of various 

 agricultural implements, among them his famous reaper, received 

 the thanks of the French Academy of Sciences for having done 

 more for the cause of agriculture than any other man living. 

 " Owing to Mr. McCormick's invention," said William H. Seward 

 in 1860, " the line of civilization moves westward thirty miles each 

 year." Richard J. Gatling, of Hertford County, N. C., devised va- 

 rious machines and the " Gatling gun," now an arm of the United 

 States service and adopted by foreign governments as well. Both 

 McCormick and Gatling moved West the former to Chicago and 

 the latter to St. Louis the country districts of Virginia and North 

 Carolina affording them poor fields for their endeavors. Henry 

 J. Rogers, a Baltimorean, was the practical adviser and assistant 

 of Morse in the construction of the first telegraph line in the 

 United States, which was built in 1844 between Washington and 

 Baltimore. He was the superintendent of it and made many im- 

 provements in it, and was the inventor of several telegraphic in- 

 struments. Rogers also devised the first system of pyrotechnic 

 signals in the United States and the one by means of flags that 

 was adopted by the navy in 1846. The author of international 

 fog signals was Samuel P. Griffin, of Georgia ; and the inventor of 

 the first complete system of ciphers used by the associated press 

 was Dr. Alexander Jones, of North Carolina. The name of Maury 

 stands above that of every other Southerner, if not of every Ameri- 

 can, in his contributions to science. Maury's writings demon- 

 strated that meteorology could be raised to the certainty of a sci- 

 ence, and Humboldt credited him with being its founder. He was 

 also the first to give a complete description of the Gulf Stream and 

 to mark out specific routes to be followed in crossing the ocean, 

 which won for him the name of the " pathfinder of the seas." In 

 addition to these he founded the method of deep-sea sounding, 

 and his letters to Cyrus W. Field, now in the National Observa- 

 tory at Washington, prove him to have been the first to sug- 

 gest the idea of connection between the two continents by means 

 of a cable on the bed of the ocean, and the present cable was laid 

 along the lines pointed out by him. The plan of splicing the 



