Mr. Henry A. Severn, of Herne Hill, has invented a
very clever little instrument, called a tell-tale compass, by which the captain or master of a ship, when down in his cabin, may know whether or not the ship is sailing her course, or is wandering from it. He uses the constant position of the compass-card and the varying one of the ship so as to produce an electric contact, which rings a bell in case the angle made by the line of actual progress with the course to be steered, exceeds a certain deviation, on either side ; and he proposes that the bell rung in case of deviation on one side, shall be different in tone from that rung in case of deviation on the other side. His invention is a veritable symbol of the chief inventions of the age, which are always employed in superseding the responsibilities of individual watchfulness, by mechanical warnings that allow of intermittent zeal. Even in matters of pure conscience we are very apt to prefer to trust to the sudden warning that some electric contact with social feeling is suddenly joined or inter- rupted, rather than exact from ourselves a rigid and vigilant scrutiny of our own course. A kind of social alarm is the fashionable conscience of the age.
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