It is entitled "Good thought":-- "A circumstance which tends to confuse, in fairly ascertaining priority of invention, is that a subsequent state of knowledge is confounded in the general mind with the state of knowledge when the invention is first announced as successful.

This is certainly very unfair.

When Morse announced his invention, what was the general state of knowledge in regard to the telegraph?
It should be borne in mind that a knowledge of the futile attempts at electric telegraphs previous to his successful one has been brought out from the lumber garret of science by the research of eighteen years.

Nothing was known of such telegraphs to many scientific men of the highest attainments in the centres of civilization.

Professor Morse says himself (and certainly he has not given in any single instance a statement which has been falsified) that, at the time he devised his system, he supposed himself to be the first person that ever put the words 'electric telegraph' together.