445 
THE MEETING OF AFRIL, 1844. 
yielded to the intense heat produced by the flame of the blow-pipe. In chemical 
analysis, the useful labors of Keating, Vanuxen, Seybert, Booth, Clemson, Litton, 
and Moss, would fill many volumes. In organic chemistry, the researches of 
dark Hare and Boyd were rewarded by the discovery of a new ether, the most 
explosive compound known to man. Mitchel’s experiments on the penetration of 
membranes by gases, and the ingenious extension of them by Dr. Rogers, are worthy 
of all praise. The softening of India rubber, by Dr. Mitchell, renders it a most 
useful article. Dyer’s discovery of soda ash yielded him a competence. Our 
countrymen have also made most valuable improvements in refining sugar, in the 
manufacture of lard oil, and stearin candles, and the preservation of timber by 
Earle’s process. Sugar and molasses have been extracted in our country from the 
corn stalk, but with what, if any profit, as to either, is not yet determined. No 
part of mechanics has produced such surprising results as the steam engine, and 
our countrymen have been among the foremost and most distinguished in this great 
and progressive branch. When Rumsey, of Pennsylvania, made a steamboat which 
moved against the current of the James river four miles an hour, his achievement 
was so much in advance of the age, as to acquire no public confidence. When 
John Fitch’s boat stemmed the current of the Delaware, contending successfully 
with sail boats, it was called, in derision, the scheme boat. So the New Yorkers. 
When the steamboat of their own truly great mechanic, Stevens, after making a 
trip from Hoboken, burnt accidentally one of its boiler tubes, it was proclaimed a 
failure. Fulton also encountered unbounded ridicule and opposition, as he ad¬ 
vanced to confer the greatest benefits on mankind, by the application of steam to 
navigation. So Oliver Evans, of Pennsylvania, (who has made such useful im¬ 
provements in the flour mill,) was pronounced insane, when he applied to the Legis¬ 
latures of Pennsylvania and Maryland for special privileges in regard to the appli¬ 
cation of steam to locomotion on common roads. In 1810, he was escorted by a 
mob of boys, when his amphibolas was moved on wheels by steam more than a 
mile through the streets of Philadelphia, to the river Schuylkill, and there, taking 
to the water, was paddled by steam to the wharves of the Delaware, where it was 
to work as a dredging machine. Fulton’s was the first successful steamboat, Ste¬ 
vens’s the first that navigated the ocean, Oliver Evans’s the first high-pressure engine 
applied to steam navigation. Stevens’s boat, by an accident, did not precede Ful¬ 
ton’s, and Stevens’s engine was wholly American, and constructed entirely by him¬ 
self, and his propeller resembled much to that now introduced by Ericsson. Stevens 
united the highest mechanical skill with a bold, original, inventive genius. His 
sons, (especially Mr. Robert L. Stevens, of New York,) have inherited much of the 
extraordinary skill and talent of their distinguished father. The first steamboat 
that ever crossed the ocean was built by one of our countrymen, and their skill in 
naval architecture has been put in requisition by the Emperor of Russia and the 
Sultan of Turkey. The steam machines invented by our countrymen to drive piles, 
load vessels, and excavate roads, are most ingenious and useful. The use of steam, 
as a locomotive power, upon the water and the land, is admirably adapted to our 
mighty rivers and extended territory. From Washington to the mouth of the 
Oregon is but one half, and to the mouth of the Del Norte but ono fourth, of the 
distance of the railroads already constructed here; and to the latter point, at the 
rate of motion (thirty miles an hour) now in daily use abroad, the trip would be 
performed in two days, and to the former in four days. Thus steam, if we measure 
distance by the time in which it is traversed, renders our whole Union, with its 
No. 3. 29 
