



Annual Address. 



interest which my visits to it gave me in my early days. 

 Many years before leaving his- own country he had become 

 deeply interested in the subject of steam and its applica- 

 tion to the propelling of vessels, and among his early 

 papers in our journals will be found some suggestions for 

 the improvement of the steam engine. His experiments 

 on this subject were steadily prosecuted up to the time of 

 his departure for France, and so confident was he of success, 

 that in 1796 he procured, in advance from the legislature, 

 certain exclusive privileges within this state in case he 

 should succeed in constructing a boat propelled by steam 

 at a rate of not less than four miles an hour. This caused 

 him to be regarded, popularly, as a mere theorist and 

 visionary, and his projected boat was referred to as the 

 chimera. His mission to France interrupted his experi- 

 ments, but while in Paris he became acquainted with 

 Fulton, whom he associated with him in a renewed course 

 of experiments with a boat on the Seine, and which were 

 continued afterwards on their return to this country, and 

 finally, after a vast outlay on the part of Livingston, 

 resulted in complete success. On his return home he 

 withdrew from his long career of public life, to the quiet 

 of his ancestral estate on the banks of the Hudson. Here, 

 with all the appointments of comfort and elegance which 

 wealth and cultivated tastes could supply, amid scenes of 

 natural beauty not inferior to those of Tusculum and the 

 Alban hills, he, like the great statesmen and orators of old 

 Rome, found the solace and happiness of his declining 

 years, not in ignoble sloth and luxury, but in his books, 

 in his memorials of foreign travel, in converse with chosen 

 friends, and in those useful and elevating studies and pur- 

 suits which through all the labors of his public life had 

 ever constituted his highest enjoyment. Here he renewed 

 those experiments by which he sought to raise agriculture 

 from the dead level of routine to something of the intelli- 



