no THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



or from Europe, while even as late as the civil war our news was two 

 weeks old when it reached England. What a contrast to the present, 

 when the news of the fall of a cabinet or the overthrow of a sultan 

 last night in any part of the world is put before us at breakfast this 

 morning, and that not only in the centers of population, but in remote 

 country districts. Nations can not now ignore each other's feelings 

 and desires, while those misapprehensions which lead to war are made 

 many times less frequent. The use of the ocean cable and of the tele- 

 phone has largely transformed methods of doing business. Time is 

 money, and although the increased facility of locomotion has led hosts 

 of business men to circulate from one end of the country to the other, 

 this can now in large measure be saved by the use of the telephone. 



More important for the existence of man even than transportation 

 and communication is food. The applications of science have made 

 not one, but thousands of blades of grass grow where one grew before. 

 Chemistry has shown how to fertilize the exhausted soil, engineering 

 has furnished water where none was, and caused the desert to blossom 

 as the rose. Its latest feat, in the anxiety due to the exhaustion of the 

 nitrate beds, has been the fixation of the nitrogen of the air, which in 

 Norway combines the harnessing of the waters with the compulsion, in 

 the electric arc, of the nitrogen to unite with the oxygen, thus yielding 

 unlimited nitrates for the restoration of our exhausted food supplies. 

 Here also transportation comes in, so that the famines which formerly 

 vexed large portions of the earth have now lost their terrors. When 

 we think of the misery of the English agricultural classes before the 

 abolition of'the corn laws we may well praise the development of trans- 

 portation which has enabled her to eat out of our full hand. At the 

 same time the application of thermodynamics to freezing machinery 

 has enabled us to send our meat across the ocean to become the roast 

 beef of old England. The effects of all this upon the farmer can not 

 be passed by. Commanding the markets of the world, ploughing his 

 fields by steam or electricity, grinding his grain by gasoline, feeding 

 his stock from silos, milking his cows by vacuum, cooling his cream by 

 cold-producing machinery, separating it in a centrifugal creamer, 

 making his cheese by the aid of chemistry so that he duplicates the 

 product of any locality in the world, in easy reach of the city by auto- 

 mobile or trolley-car, and in communication with all his neighbors by 

 telephone, he is no longer an object of derision, a hayseed, but an 

 example of the works of science, demanding an equal part of influence 

 in the government of the country, and gladly contributing of his rich 

 store to the endowment of institutions like this for the education of 

 his youth and the further advancement of science. 



Again let us consider what science has done for the amelioration of 

 health. When we consider the crowding, the filth, the misery of the 



