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OLIVER EVANS AND THE STEAM ENGINE.

A correspondent of the New York _Times_, deeming that far too much
credit has been given to foreigners for the practical development of
the steam engine, contributes the following interesting _resume_:

Of all the inventions of ancient or modern times none have more
importantly and beneficently influenced the affairs of mankind than
the double acting high pressure steam engine, the locomotive, the
steam railway system, and the steamboat, all of which inventions are
of American origin. The first three are directly and the last
indirectly associated with a patent that was granted by the State of
Maryland, in 1787, being the very year of the framing of the
Constitution of the United States. In view of the momentous nature of
the services which these four inventions have rendered to the material
and national interests of the people of the United States, it is to be
hoped that neither they nor their origin will be forgotten in the
coming celebration of the centennial of the framing of the
Constitution.

The high pressure steam engine in its stationary form is almost
ubiquitous in America. In all great iron and steel works, in all
factories, in all plants for lighting cities with electricity, in
brief, wherever in the United States great power in compact form is
wanted, there will be found the high pressure steam engine furnishing
all the power that is required, and more, too, if more is demanded,
because it appears to be equal to every human requisition. But go
beyond America. Go to Great Britain, and the American steam
engine--although it is not termed American in Great Britain--will be
found fast superseding the English engine--in other words, James
Watt's condensing engine. It is the same the world over. On all the
earth there is not a steam locomotive that could turn a wheel but for
the fact that, in common with every locomotive from the earliest
introduction of that invention, it is simply the American steam engine
put on wheels, and it was first put on wheels by its American
inventor, Oliver Evans, being the same Oliver Evans to whom the State
of Maryland granted the before mentioned patent of 1787.

He is the same Oliver Evans whom Elijah Galloway, the British writer
on the steam engine, compared with James Watt as to the authorship of
the locomotive, or rather "steam carriage," as the locomotive was in
those days termed. Afte