L. S. BOSS — AN ADDRESS TO THE ACADEMY. 
21 
onstrated that it could be used for the propulsion of land carriages, and 
claimed that the time would come when transportation would be carried 
on over land on railways of wood and iron by the agency of steam, and 
though his opportunity for early education had been of limited char- 
acter, he may be justly regarded as the pioneer of our present system of 
railroad transportation, which has filled our solitary and waste places 
with people, and furnished them an agency for distribution and con- 
sumption not easily overestimated. 
When a child, it fell to my lot to sit at night before the log fire of our 
frontier cabin, and with deft but tired fingers pick from the cotton seed 
the lint which was to be carded, spun, and woven into clothing for the 
family, and I have lived to see it taken from the farmer’s wagon, and 
while manipulated almost entirely by machinery, pass into a compact 
and perfect commercial package or bale. The invention of the cotton 
gin not only more than doubled the value of every acre of cotton-pro- 
ducing land in the South, but it brought into more conspicuous promi- 
nence that ancient plant- which sprang from the centuries numbering 
back to the deluge, but not until the Seventeenth century, when first in- 
troduced into the South, did it find a soil and climate best adapted to it, 
and a people with both the skill and intelligence necessary to give it the 
most successful cultivation, until its yield has become an element of the 
largest manufacturing interest in .the world, a currency within itself, 
and the greatest boon to human industry. 
A hundred years ago agriculture was in little better condition all 
over the world than it was a thousand years before. It is almost within 
the limit of Iny memory that the use of iron for manufacture of farm 
implements was unknown. They were made of wood, and our present 
superb equipment of farm machinery existed nowhere. The advance 
made in all its branches has been prodigious, due largely to the crea- 
tion of mechanical appliances by American inventive genius. In re- 
counting a few of the indicative trophies which scientists have brought 
from their explorations of every province of knowledge, it may be added 
that as unimportant as it may have appeared at the time, nevertheless, 
the discovery of the uses of ether in surgery disarmed sickness of half its 
pain, and death of half its terrors. And scientific research for the 
mitigation of sorrow and misfortune of those afficted with physical in- 
firmities gave eyes to the fingers of the blind, and taught the deaf and 
dumb articulate speech. 
It occurs to me that surely it must defy the power of human measure- 
ment to graduate the depth and intensity of the pulse-stirring antici- 
pations which thrill every nerve and mount to the brain of the happy 
scientist when, as if by magic alchemy, he succeeds in transmuting the 
visions of the enthusiast into some living reality. 
