MECHANICAL ENGINEERING. 43 



its steadiness. So it has happened that the nineteenth century has illus- 

 trated such an apparent, though not real, exception to the law. The 

 forces of civilization had been cumulative; the resultant forces gather- 

 ing through the earlier ages, partly stored and latent, but none the less 

 potential, and partly as the actual and kinetic energies of phenomena of 

 visible evolution. All energies seem to have become kinetic and visible 

 in their aggregate results in this Victorian Era. The outcome has been 

 described as a 'tidal wave' of upward and onward movement on the sea 

 of universal progress, a climax of an evolution of which the earlier 

 periods have been quiet and silent and simply those of preparation. It 

 has been like the action of the seas beating upon a yielding shore. 

 Slowly and steadily through the ages it cuts farther and farther into 

 the obstruction, unobserved and unrealized as a great natural move- 

 ment, until, at last, the dike is cut through and the ocean rushes in and 

 overflows the land. This flood, beneficent as the other might be de- 

 structive, has had a somewhat similar history. The nineteenth century 

 is the period of uprush and inrush of the flood of efiiciently applied 

 human intellect, making effective al those powers which have been till 

 now frittered away, the magnificent potentialities of which have never 

 been before realized. 



This volcanic development of previously latent, but gathering and 

 cumulative, energy has been effective in every department of human 

 activity, but most of all, perhaps, in the field of invention, of the me- 

 chanic arts, of what we have come to-day to designate 'mechanical en- 

 gineering.' The acceleration has been one beside which that of the fall- 

 ing stone or a dropping shot or the meteor precipitated into the field 

 of attraction of our globe seems insignificant in resultant effects. In 

 the year 1800 we had not a locomotive or a railroad for public service in 

 the world. To-day the United States alone, with half the mileage of 

 the world, possess 200,000 miles, nearly, of rail and about 40,000 loco- 

 motives. Then we had no telegraph; to-day its wires span the conti- 

 nents and carry messages along the bed of every ocean, binding the 

 continents as with ties of steel. Over three millions of miles of wire 

 transmit three hundred to four hundred millions of messages annually, 

 and nations are brought within speaking distance and bound heart to 

 heart. The events of the antipodes are signalled to us, hour by hour, 

 as they occur, and we read at the breakfast table of battles, coronations, 

 deaths and births of individuals and of nations, of all the great phe- 

 nomena of a world, from Atlantic to Pacific and to Atlantic again, and 

 almost from pole to pole. 



(To be concluded.) 



