Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/393

Rh found a literary magazine in Charleston all met with failure, despite the fact that an unusually cultivated society dwelt in that city. Washington Allston, after finishing his art studies in Europe, located in Boston, which was able to hold out to him greater inducements than the little city of Charleston, the metropolis of his native State. Gottschalk, the composer, whose dreamy, sensuous music suggests his Southern birth, after finishing his musical course in Paris, made his début there, and died finally in Brazil, spending but little time in New Orleans. Audubon, with his dog and gun, and his pencil and drawing pad, searched the woods and bayous of his native Louisiana for his specimens of birds and natural history that were to win for him the name of the greatest naturalist of the New World. But he labored under adverse conditions, and he had to canvass the large cities of Europe for subscribers to enable him to publish his book on the birds of America, the greatest ornithological work ever undertaken. This he brought out at New York in 1830, with plates containing over one thousand birds of life size, and Cuvier pronounced it "the most magnificent monument that Art has yet raised to Nature."

In the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison, of Virginia, and Charles Pinckney, of South Carolina, proposed the clause protecting authors and inventors, which was the foundation of our copyright and patent-right system. The Patent Office was organized and placed on a firm basis largely through the efforts of Jefferson, who is credited with being its founder, and later on it was reorganized and perfected during Jackson's administration. Jefferson was himself an inventor, being the first American to study and improve the plow. The year 1789 is memorable as the date upon which Rumsey, a Maryland machinist, then living in Virginia, launched his boat upon the Potomac, propelled by steam. Fitch performing a similar experiment upon the Delaware about the same time. Later on, in 1793, Rumsey went to England and made a successful trial trial on the Thames. This same year Eli Whitney, a young New-Englander, invented his famous cotton gin, that may be said to have revolutionized the history of the South and the Union. As an illustration of the scarcity of manufacturing and mechanical establishments in the South at that date, it may be mentioned that Whitney had to draw himself the iron wire he needed and make his own iron tools at the plantation of Mrs. Greene, the wife of General Nathanael Greene, on the Savannah River, where he was residing. It is a notable circumstance that the first canal in America of any consequence, the first telegraph line, and the first railway propelled by steam were all constructed in the South, and the first steamship to cross the Atlantic embarked from a Southern port. The first canal of