Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 6.djvu/193

 CYRUS W. FIELD 355 tending a line of telegraph to Newfoundland, to reduce the time of the trans- mission of news between Europe and America ; when the idea flashed into his mind that the telegraph might span the Atlantic. The next day Mr. Field wrote to Lieutenant Maury, of the National Observatory at Washington, and to Pro- fessor Morse, who invented the telegraph. The Atlantic telegraph was as truly the conception and the accomplish men i of Mr. Field, as the discovery of America was the ambition and the act of Co- lumbus ; and Chief Justice Chase was not extravagant when he said the telegraph across the ocean was " the most wonderful achievement of civilization," and en- titled " its author to a distinguished rank among benefactors ; " or when he added : " High upon that illustrious roll will his name be placed, and there will it remain while oceans divide and telegraphs unite mankind." John Bright said : " My friend Field, the Columbus of modern times, by his cable has moored the New World alongside the Old." Equally lofty testimony to the splendor of his fame is that of the London Times of August 6, 1858, saying: " Since the discovery of Columbus, nothing has been done in any degree comparable to the vast enlargement which has thus been given to the sphere of human activity." From the first vital spark that at last glows into the bloom of life, each hu- man being is endowed with certain qualities and capacities, aptitudes, inspirations, possibilities, limitations ; and if one trace the stream of blood to its remotest sources, there is no inconsistency in ancestry, and the science of humanity may be as strict within its boundaries as that of geology, or the story of fruitful trees, or the magnetic constellations. The four famous brothers have given the Field family an almost unique celeb- rity in this country. They were the sons of the Rev. David Dudley Field, of Western Massachusetts, the room-mate at Yale College of Jeremiah Evarts, father of William M. Evarts. Field and Evarts entered college together in 1 798, and graduated in 1802. The American Fields are the descendants of John Field, the astronomer of Ardsley, in Yorkshire, who gained a great reputation by pub- lishing astronomical tables, and died in 1587. Ardsley, it has not passed from the general recollection, was the name of the estate on the Hudson where for so many years Mr. Cyrus W. Field made his summer home. The family name was in the fifteenth century changed 'from Feld, Feild, Felde, and Fielde, into its present form ; and John Field, the astronomer, was the first to introduce the Copernican system in England, and he received a patent in 1558, au- thorizing him to bear as a crest over his family arms, an arm issuing from clouds and supporting a globe. Dr. Richard Field, chaplain of Queen Elizabeth, was of the same family, and author of the " Book of the Church," republished in four volumes at Oxford in 1843. It was the last day of autumn, November 30, 1819, at the Morgan Place, on a hill that sloped to the river, near Stockbridge, Mass., that Cyrus West Field was born. There were three older brothers David Dudley, Timothy Beale, and Matthew Dickinson.. The Cyrus came from a man of note in the town, named