The fool and the fool’s fire-ship became the butt of all sensible people in Europe as well as in America.  Victor Hugo remarks that, “In the year 1807, when the first steamboat of Fulton, commanded by Livingston, furnished with one of Watts’s engines sent from England, and manoeuvred, besides her ordinary crew, by two Frenchmen only, Andr Michaux and another, made her first voyage from New York to Albany, it happened that she set sail on the 17th of August.  The ministers took up this important fact, and in numberless chapels preachers were heard calling down a malediction on the machine, and declaring that this number seventeen was no other than the total of the ten horns and seven heads of the beasts in the Apocalypse.  In America they invoked against the steamboat the beast from the book of Revelation; in Europe, the reptile of the book of Genesis.  The SAVANS had rejected steamboats as impossible; the priests had anathematized them as impious; science had condemned, and religion consigned them to perdition.”

“In the archipelago of the British Channel islands,” this learned author goes on to say, “the first steamboat which made its appearance received the name of the ‘Devil Boat.’  In the eyes of these worthy fishermen, once Catholics, now Calvinists, but always bigots, it seemed to be a portion of the infernal regions which had been somehow set afloat.  A local preacher selected for his discourse the question of, ’Whether man has the right to make fire and water work together when God had divided them.’ (Gen. ch. i. v.4.) No; this beast composed of iron and fire did not resemble leviathan!  Was it not an attempt to bring chaos again into the universe?”

So much for young America, and so much for old mother England!  Now listen, men and women of to-day, to the wisdom of France—­scientific France.  “A mad notion, a gross delusion, an absurdity!” Such was the verdict of the Academy of Sciences when consulted by Napoleon on the subject of steamboats early in the present century.

It seems scarcely credible now that all this transpired in the days of our fathers, not so very long ago.  Time is a great leveller.  Education of the head as well as of the heart has liberalized the pulpit, and the man of theoretical science to-day would not dare to stake his reputation by denying any apparently well-established theory, while the inventors of telephones, perpetual-motion motors, &c., are gladly hailed as leaders in the march of progress so dear to every American heart.  The pulpit is now on the side of honest science, and the savant teaches great truths, while the public mind is being educated to receive and utilize the heretofore concealed or undeveloped mysteries of a wise and generous Creator, who has taught his children that they must labor in order to possess.