representatives of Christian faiths to put them, by implication or assertion, in the position of giving support to tendencies which they have an equal interest with the expounders of science in opposing. I shall content myself with one quotation from an authoritative source—Bishop Fallows, of Chicago— which places this dubious attempt to mingle religion with unscientific medical dogmas in the only light in which right-minded persons of whatever training can complacently look upon it.
"If my good friends," says the Bishop, "are going to start, or believe in a professed religious system because they have been healed through the influence of a mental law as universal as gravitation, the people who have been cured by patent nostrums have just as much reason to establish a religious cult of Christian liver pillists, Christian Sarsaparillists, Christian Celery Compoundists, or Christian Cholera Mixturists, as had Mother Eddy to found a church of Christian Scientists. 'By their fruits ye shall know them.' I do know some of the best Christians living who believe with unshaken faith that they were cured by these patent nostrums. But they have had the good sense to remain in the church and not claim a special dispensation for the discoveries of their favorite patent medicines."
| Joseph Jastrow. |
| University of Wisconsin. |
THE INVENTOR OF THE SEWING MACHINE.
To the Editor: In the November Popular Science Monthly the munificent gift of Miss Helen Gould for a Hall of Fame is noticed, and thirty names are designated as the choice of certain prominent men (not named) for place therein as the most eminent Americans.
In the list given the name of Elias Howe appears, which must produce astonishment in the minds of every one who lias a knowledge of him or of the history of the sewing machine, upon which alone his claim to notoriety rests. To all who are acquainted with the advent of that machine, Howe occupies a very minor place. Patents were granted for such machines long before Howe entered the field, and he never succeeded in producing a practical machine, until more than one device invented by others was added to it.
Several inventors were striving to make a practical sewing machine, which was finally accomplished on different lines by some of them. The fact that Howe received royalties from these men. who procured the extension of his patent, was a matter of policy that we pass as irrelevant to the question of the introduction of this great public acquisition, in which he took no active part.
Howe was not a first-class mechanic, and the devices he patented w r ere all elaborated before him by others, and not until other important devices were added did the sewing machine come into use. To place his name on the roll of fame above a host of his superiors on the records of the Patent Office would be doing American genius a grave injustice that would render the Hall of Fame absurd. I trust no such radical mistake will be perpetrated.
Vindicator.
