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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

cable in mid-ocean was devised by Dr. James C. Palmer, of Maryland.

The limits of this article do not admit of giving a list of all the Southern men who have made inventions of note. Some of them are John Lawrence Smith, of South Carolina, the celebrated mineralogist and inventor of the inverted telescope; "Sibley, of Louisiana, and his conical tent; Gibbs, of Virginia, and his sewing machine; Janney, of Virginia, and his car coupler; Gorrie, of Louisiana, and his ice machine; McComb, of Louisiana, and his 'arrow' cotton tie; Gaynor, of Kentucky, and his fire telegraph; Stone, of Missouri, and his grain roller mill; Remberts, of Texas, with his roller cotton compress; Clarke, of Texas, with his envelope machine, and Campbell, with his cotton picker; Bonsack, of Virginia, with his cigarette machine; Coffee, of Virginia, with his tobacco stemmer; Stevens, of Florida, with his fruit wrapper; Law, of Georgia, with his cotton planter; Avery, of Kentucky, with his plow sulky; Watt and Starke, of Virginia, with their plows; McDonald, of our own day, with his fish ladders and hatcheries, filling our streams with fish." Henry Draper, a Virginian by birth, who removed to New York, made what has been called "the most original discovery ever made in physical science by an American." He was an authority upon telescopic work, and his experiments in his specialty of celestial photography led to the discovery of oxygen. in the sun by this means and a new theory of the solar spectrum.

In the practice of medicine the Southern physician was under the disadvantage of having thinly populated country districts as the field of his labors, and he lacked the benefits of association and co-operation with those of his own calling that a city physician enjoys. But his isolated situation, as has been said of him, often stimulated boldness of thought and original investigation. Ephraim McDowell, M. D., a native of Rockbridge County, Va., and who had moved to the little village of Danville, Ky., performed here in 1809 the first operation on record for the extirpation of the ovary—an announcement received with incredulity in Europe, but the truth of which was established, and which won for him the title of the "father of ovariotomy." Crawford W. Long, M. D., a Georgian, performed in Jefferson County, his State, on March 30, 1842, the first surgical operation on record, with the patient in a state of anæsthesia, which was produced by the inhalation of sulphuric ether. Of a like class of men was J. Marion Sims, M. D., of Alabama, the pioneer in gynæcology and abdominal surgery. The eminent surgeon. Dr. Hunter McGuire, whose position as Medical Director of Stonewall Jackson's corps. Army of Northern Virginia, gave him exceptional opportunities of information, said of the surgeon in the Confederate army: "His