e a nation. The four elements have all accepted the
American as their master. The great harvests of the earth are gathered
by his mowing and reaping machines. The flame that is creeping from its
lair to spring at the roofs of the crowded city is betrayed to its
watchful guardians by the American telegraphic fire-alarm, and the
conflagration that reddens the firmament is subdued by the inundation
that flows upon it from an American steam-fire-engine. In the realm of
air, the Frenchman who sent a bubble of silk to the clouds must divide
his honors with the American who emptied the clouds themselves of their
electric fires. Water, the mightiest of all, which devours the earth
and quenches the fire, and rides over the air in vaporous exhalations,
has been the chosen field of ingenious labor for our people. The great
American invention of _ice_,--perhaps there is a certain approach to its
own coolness in calling it an invention, though Sancho, it may be
remembered, considered sleep in that light,--this remarkable invention
of ice, as a tropical commodity, could have sprung only from a
republican and revolutionary brain. The steamboat has been claimed for
various inventors, for one so far back as 1543; but somehow or other it
happened, as it has so often happened, that "the chasm from mere
attempts to positive achievement was first bridged by an American." Our
wave-splitting clippers have changed the whole model of sailing-vessels.
One of them, which was to have been taken in tow by the steam-vessels of
the Crimean squadron, spread her wings, and sailed proudly by them all.
Our iron water-beetles would send any of the old butterfly three-deckers
to the bottom, as quickly as one of these would sink a Roman trireme.

The Yankee whittling a shingle with his jack-knife is commonly accepted
as a caricature, but it is an unconscious symbolization of the plastic
instinct which rises step by step to the clothes-pin, the apple-parer,
the mowing-machine, the wooden truss-bridge, the clipper-ship, the
carved figure-head, the Cleopatra of the World's Exhibition.

One American invention, or discovery, has gone far towards paying back
all that the new continent owes to the old civilizations. The cradle of
artificial _anaesthesia_--man's independence of the tyranny of pain--must
be looked for at the side of the Cradle of Liberty. Never was a greater
surprise than the announcement of this miraculous revelation to the
world. One evening in Oc