We claim to have done our full share in the way of industrial inventions since we have become 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 October, 1846, a professional brother called upon the writer of this paper.  He shut the door carefully, and looked nervously around him.  Then he spoke, and told of the wondrons results of the experiment which had just been made in the operating-room.  “In one fortnight’s time,” he said, “all Europe will be ablaze with this discovery.”  He then produced and read a paper that he had just drawn up for a learned society of which we were both