IV PREFACE. 



The writer finds himself so identified with the subject, that he 

 deems it impossible to give a correct history of the recent inventions 

 in gum-elastic, without alluding to himself oftener than he could 

 wish, by speaking of the trials and discouragements which he had to 

 encounter during the first seven years of his experiments. 



If the reader is disposed to charge him with alluding too often to 

 incidents of personal history connected with that of the subject, he 

 may plead in extenuation, that the whole period of seven years was 

 but a continued succession of occurrences similar to those related, 

 and equally entitled to narration. 



However dry and uninteresting the literary contents may be, the 

 aim has been to make the work useful, and, by the use of gum- 

 elastic in its construction, to make the subject the better understood, 

 from its being tangible, and emphatically a gum-elastic work. 



If the author has succeeded better in the mechanical than in the 

 literary execution of the book, it may be said that this is as it should 

 be: his profession is not that of authorship; and further, for those 

 who have both duties to perform, it is often less difficult to do things 

 that are interesting, than it is to give an interesting account of them. 



