Haye-Descartes. He was sent by his parents to the College of Chinon,
whence he entered the Ecole des Arts et Metiers, and afterward went
to Paris to work in the shop of a clock-maker. This was an excellent
apprenticeship for our future electrician, since it is in small works
that electricity excels; and, if its domain is to be increased, it is
only on condition that the electric mechanician shall never lose sight
of the fact that he should be a clock-maker, and that his fingers, to
use M. Dumas's apt words, should possess at once the strength of those
of the Titans and the delicacy of those of fairies. It was not long ere
Trouve set up a shop of his own, whither inventors flocked in crowds;
and the work he did for these soon gave up to him the secrets of the art
of creating. The first applications that he attempted related to the use
of electricity in surgery, a wonderfully fecund branch, but one whose
importance was scarcely suspected, notwithstanding the results
already obtained through the application of the insufflation pile to
galvano-cautery. What the surgeon needed was to see plainly into the
cavities of the human body. Trouve found a means of lighting these
up with lamps whose illuminating power was fitted for that sort of
exploration. This new mode of illumination having been adopted, it was
but natural that it should afterward find an application in dangerous
mines, powder mills, and for a host of different purposes. But the
perfection of this sort of instruments was the wound explorer, by the
aid of which a great surgeon sounded the wounds that Italian balls had
made in Garibaldi's foot.

[Illustration: GUSTAVE TROUVE.]

The misfortunes of France afterward directed Trouve's attention to
military electricity, and led him to devise a perfect system of portable
telegraphy, in which his hermetic pile lends itself perfectly to all