imperfectly executed, and we propose to contribute what we can to it in the present publication.
The Popular Science Monthly will make its appeal, not to the illiterate, but to the generally educated classes. The universities, colleges, academies, and high schools of this country are numbered by hundreds, and their graduates by hundreds of thousands. Their culture is generally literary, with but a small portion of elementary science; but they are active minded, and competent to follow connected thought in untechnical English, even if it be sometimes a little close. Our pages will be adapted to the wants of these, and will enable them to carry on the work of self instruction in science.
The present undertaking is experimental. We propose to give it a fair trial; but it will be for the public to decide whether the publication shall be continued. All who are in sympathy with its aims are invited to do what they can to extend its circulation.
THE WORK OF PROF. MORSE.
Prof. Morse has completed his career, and taken his place in the past. He belongs now to memory and to fame, and his name and work will help to save our age from oblivion in the distant future. After a few thousand years, when the inferior races of men shall have disappeared from the earth, except perhaps a few samples preserved as antiquarian specimens; when civilization has overspread the world, and the telegraph system has become so universal and perfected that any individual will be able to put himself into instantaneous communication with any other individual upon the globe, then will the name of Morse, one of the great founders of the system, be more eminent than any upon whom we now look back as the illustrious of ancient times.
Prof. Morse illustrated the law of the hereditary descent of talent, being the son of the Rev. Jedediah Morse, the first American geographer. He was born in Massachusetts, in 1791, and graduated at Yale College in 1810. The American inventor of the telegraph, like the inventor of the steam boat, was at first an artist, and distinguished himself both in painting and sculpture. He studied abroad, and received the gold medal from the Adelphi Society of Arts for his first attempt in sculpture. Returning to this country, he was engaged, by the corporation of New York City, to paint the portrait of Lafayette; he assisted in founding the National Academy of Design, was its first president, and gave the first course of lectures ever delivered on art in this country.
In college, young Morse had paid some attention to chemistry and physics, but did not afterward specially pursue them. He took up the subject of electricity much as Franklin did, through the influence of others, and with reference to utilitarian ends. The invention of the Leyden jar, in 1746, set all Europe to experimenting, and the next year Peter Collinson, of London, sent a box of glass tubes, and other things for experimenting, to his friend Franklin, at Philadelphia, who took the electric fever and went enthusiastically to work, giving the world the lightning rod in five years after he began to investigate. So, while Morse was lecturing on the fine arts, his friend Prof. G. F. Dana was lecturing in the same institution on electro-magnetism, and his attention was thus drawn to the subject. This was in 1826-'27, when much was said of the many and brilliant discoveries in these sciences.
The conception of the telegraph in Prof. Morse's mind dates from 1832, when he was forty one years old—exactly the age of Franklin when he received his instruments from Collinson, and entered upon the study of electricity. It was in a conversation on electromagnetism on board the packet ship
