waiting to crown it, fell into a seventeen years' swoon, during which Fitch died, and the public at large forgot all that he had ever said or done, its life did not become extinct. It was not created, but revived, by Fulton, aided by the refreshing effusion of Chancellor Livingston's money. We did not need a new book to make us more certain of these facts, but we did need a more thorough biography of John Fitch, and, with great respect for the industry and faithfulness of Mr. Westcott, it is our opinion that we do still. He has demonstrated that the materials for such a work are abundant, and a glance at the mortal career of Fitch will show him to be an uncommonly interesting subject.
John Fitch was born in Windsor, Connecticut, in 1743. At the age of five, while his father was absent from home, courting his stepmother, he heroically extinguished a fire of blazing flax, which would otherwise have consumed the house, and while he was smarting from his burns was cruelly beaten by an elder brother, who misapprehended the case of the little boy, very much as the world did that of the man he became. The domestic discipline he encountered under the paternal roof was of the severest New England pattern of those days, and between its theology and its economy he grew out of shape, like a thrifty pumpkin between two rocks. He loved to learn, but had few books and little schooling. His taste tended to mechanism, and he was apprenticed to a stingy clock-maker, who obliged him to work on his farm and kept him ignorant of his trade. Getting his liberty at last, he set up brass-founding, on a capital of twenty shillings, and made money at it. Then he went into the manufacture of potash, in which he was less successful. He married a wife who proved more caustic than the potash and more than a match for his patience. He settled his affairs so as to leave her all his little property in the most manageable shape, and left her with two children, to seek a separate fortune in the wide world. The war of the Revolution found him at Trenton, New Jersey, a man of some substance, acquired as a silversmith and peddler of silver and brass sleeve-buttons of his own manufacture. It made him an officer and then an armorer in the Continental service. As a fabricator of patriotic weapons, he incurred the displeasure of his Methodist brethren by working on the Sabbath, and lost his orthodoxy in his disgust at their rebukes. Towards the close of the Revolution, getting poor in fact by getting rich in Continental money, he endeavored to save himself by investing in Virginia land-warrants, went to Kentucky as a surveyor, and became possessed of sixteen hundred acres of that wilderness. On a second expedition down the Ohio, early in 1782, he fell into the hands of the savages, in the most melodramatic style, was led captive through the vast forests and swamps to Detroit, had a very characteristic and remarkable prison-experience under British authority at Prison Island, was exchanged, and by a sea-voyage reached his home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, at the close of the same year. Immediately after the establishment of peace, he formed a company to speculate in Ohio lands, and made extensive surveys for the purpose of forestalling the best locations. Mr. Westcott's book confuses this portion of his chronology by misprinting two or three dates, on the 113th page. The hopeful game was spoiled by unexpected measures of the Confederated government; but Fitch's explorations had deeply impressed him with the sublime character of the Western rivers, and when, in April, 1785, the thought first struck him that steam could easily make them navigable upwards as well as downwards, he cared no more for lands. He had noticed the mechanical power of steam, but had never seen an engine, and did not know that one existed out of his own brain. This is the less wonderful, seeing there were only three then in America, and his science extended only to arithmetic. When his minister showed him a drawing of Newcomen's engine, in "Martin's Philosophy," he was chagrined to find that his invention had been anticipated in regard to the mode of producing the power, but he was confirmed in his belief of its availability for navigation. With no better resources than a blacksmith's shop could furnish, he set himself at work to make a steam-engine to test his theory. His success is one of those wonders of human ingenuity struggling with difficulties, moral, financial, and physical combined, which deserve both a Homer and a Macaulay to
