112 MEMORIAL OF JOSEPH HENRY. 



when Professor Henry made it plionetic, it so remained. .The 

 alphabetic symbols are obsolete. The distant magnet when excited 

 makes its dots and clicks its audible language, just as Henry 

 designed. Blot out Morse and his machine, and Professor Henry's 

 instrument, the telegraph, would go on. Like Stephenson's 

 multi-tubular boiler, it remains amid all change; for it is perfect 

 because it has a principle. Discard Professor Henry's plan, and 

 no message is possible with sound. All the signals, alarms, and 

 devices for distant intelligence have their fountain in Professor 

 Henry's brain. Given his brain, and you have Morse, Bell, 

 Edison, and the entire circle of electric inventors. 



What a grand occasion was that at the Centennial, when Sir 

 William Thompson and Professor Henry met about the tele- 

 phone! What fruition of hope! How jocund the exhuberant 

 heart leaped up to see fresh evidences of the truth of his early 

 experiments under the rigid laws of science! 



These laws however never shadowed his devotion to the beauti- 

 ful, good, and true. His modest methods of research, while they 

 extended his knowledge and enlarged his reason, never disturbed his 

 faith. While like the magnetic needle it ever pointed in one direc- 

 tion, it was never tremulous with skepticism. He who knew so 

 much of earth, and believed so much of Heaven, had a faith which 

 was larger than his reason. When he said to his students: "We 

 explain a fact, when we refer it to a law " — did he stop there ? He 

 bowed reverently, as he added — "When we explain a law, we refer 

 it to the will of God." He never allowed sense to obscure spirit or 

 secondary causes to be primal ! He spoke no spell and taught no 

 creed for evil or chance. He had the eye of reason to guide his 

 radiant path and the ear of faith to inspire and exalt his reason. 

 The impetuosity of the one was tempered by the docility of the 

 other. The dilettante, the mystic, the pantheist, and the transcend- 

 entalist were to him less than flippancy and vanity ; for he knew 



