850 MORSE MORTGAGE the king of Portugal the cross of the order of the tower and sword. In 1856 the tele- graph companies of Great Britain gave him a banquet in London ; and in Paris, in 1858, another banquet was given him by Americans, numbering more than 100, and representing almost every state in the Union. In the latter year, at the instance of Napoleon III., repre- sentatives of France, Russia, Sweden, Belgium, Holland, Austria, Sardinia, Tuscany, the Holy See, and Turkey met in Paris to decide upon a collective testimonial to him, and the result was a vote of 400,000 francs as a personal re- ward for his labors. On Dec. 29, 1868, the citizens of New York gave him a public dinner. In June, 1871, a bronze statue of him, erected by the voluntary contributions of telegraph employees, was formally unveiled in the Cen- tral park, New York, by William Cullen Bry- ant ; and in the evening a reception was held in the academy of music, at which Prof. Morse telegraphed, by means of one of the instruments used on the original line between New York and Washington, a message of greeting to all the cities of the continent. The last public service which he performed was the unveiling of the statue of Franklin in Printing House square, New York, on Jan. IT, 1872. Submarine te- legraphy also originated with Prof. Morse, who laid the first submarine lines in New York har- bor in the autumn of 1842, and received at the time from the American institute a gold medal for that achievement. In a letter from Mr. Morse to the secretary of the United States treasury, dated Aug. 10, 1843, it is believed occurs the first suggestion of the project of the Atlantic telegraph. While in Paris in 1839 he made the acquaintance of Daguerre, and from drawings furnished him by the latter he con- structed on his return the first daguerreotype apparatus and took the first sun pictures ever taken in America. He was the author of vari- ous scientific and literary papers. In 1829 he published a collection of the poems of Lucretia Maria Davidson, with a memoir; and in 1835 a volume entitled " Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States." A series of papers of reminiscences of his early strug- gles in behalf of the telegraph appeared in 1868. His life has been written by the Rev. S. Irenseus Prime, D. D. (New York, 1875). III. Sidney Edwards, an American journalist and geographer, brother of the preceding, born in Oharlestown, Mass., Feb. 7, 1794, died in New York, Dec. 23, 1871. He graduated at Yale college in 1811. In 1812-'13 he wrote a series of articles for the Boston " Columbian Centi- nel," illustrating the danger to the American Union from an undue multiplication of new states in the south, and showing that it would give to a sectional minority the control of the government. In 1815, while studying at the law school in Litchfield, Conn., he was invited to establish a weekly newspaper in Boston, which resulted in the issue of the "Boston Recorder," the prototype of that class of jour- nals now so widely known as " religious news- papers." He was the sole editor and proprietor during the 15 months in which he was con- nected with it. In 1817 Mr. Morse, in connec- tion with his elder brother, invented and pat- ented the flexible piston pump. In 1820 he published a 12mo school geography, and in 1822 an 8vo geography, which was used as a text book in several American colleges. In May, 1823, in connection with his younger brother Richard C. Morse, he established the " New York Observer," now the oldest weekly newspaper in that city, and the oldest religious newspaper in the state of New York. In 1834 he conceived the idea of a new mode of engra- ving, applicable especially to the production of plates for printing maps in connection with type under the common printing press; and after five years of experiment he succeeded in June, 1839, with the aid of his assistant, Henry A. Munson, in producing by the new art, which he named cerography, superior map prints. One of the first applications of cerography was to the illustration of a school geography writ- ten by the inventor, of which more than 100,000 copies were printed and disposed of during the first year. The art of cerography has never been patented, nor has the process been revealed to the public. Mr. Morse continued as senior editor and proprietor of the "Observer" till 1858, when he disposed of his interest to the Rev. Dr. S. I. Prime, his associate since 1840. The last years of his life were devoted to the invention of the bathometer for rapid explora- tion of the depths of the sea, and he Was en- gaged in an essay on the subject at the time of his death. MORTAR. See ARTILLERY, and CANNON. MORTGAGE (Fr. mort, dead, and gage, pledge; Lat. vadium mortuum). Kent defines a mort- gage to be " the conveyance of an estate by way of pledge for the security of a debt, to be- come void on payment of it." The old law writers Glanvil and Spelman say that mort- gage is so called because, between the time of making the conveyance and the time appointed for* payment of the debt, the creditor by the old law received the rents of the estate to his own use, so that these rents were dead or lost to the mortgageor. Littleton gives another derivation of the word, viz.: "If the feoffor doth not pay the sum due at the day limited, then the land which is put in pledge upon con- dition for the payment of the money is taken from him, and so dead to him upon condition." This derivation is the one usually adopted; though the former has been sometimes pre- ferred, not only because the idea which it con- veys of the mortgage, or vadium mortuum, is directly opposed to that of the vadium vivum, an old form of security no longer in use, in which the accruing rents were applied to di- minish the debt, but also because it illustrates the intention which mortgages were first prob- ably designed to effect. For in the times when the exaction of interest was esteemed
