ROBERT FULTON AND THE STEAMBOAT BOAT

Ralph Nading Hill '39. NewYork: Random House, 1954. 181 pp. $1.50.

Ralph Hill has brought to this volume in the Landmark Books of history for young people all the painstaking preparation and care in presentation which have characterized his earlier historical writings for more adult readers. Robert Fulton makes an appropriate subject for this series, for his life, in addition to illustrating admirable personal qualities and introducing a most significant development in the history of transportation, possesses a dramatic quality which is bound to appeal to young people. And if a touch of romance is needed, Fulton's story provides it in the mysterious Madame Francois who keeps reappearing on both sides of the channel during Fulton's twenty-year stay in England and France.

In the spirit of the miniature portraits on ivory which young Fulton painted to help in the support of his fatherless family, Mr. Hill has given his young readers a brief but colorful and appealing portrait of this important figure. Fulton's successful part in developing both the submarine and the steamboat is very well described, and his persistence in the face of extreme delay and disappointment is made abundantly clear. The author also emphasizes the way in which an invention such as the steamboat is the product of many minds and experimentation on the part of many men, and he rightly leaves the troublesome question of monopoly rights unsettled at Fulton's untimely death in 1815 at the age of fifty.

The appeal of the volume is very much enhanced by some twenty-five lively drawings by Lee James.