3 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



co-manufacturers, the aim and object of such a man being to insure 

 that he should never make a mistake by embarking his capital or his 

 time in that which has not been proved by men of large hearts and 

 large intelligence. It is such a practical man as this who delays all 

 improvement. For years he delayed the development in England of 

 the utilization of the waste gases of blast-furnaces, and he has done it 

 so successfully that, as I have already had occasion to remark, this 

 utilization is by no means universal in this kingdom. It was such 

 men as these who kept back surface condensation for twenty years. It 

 is such a man as this who, when semaphores were invented, would have 

 said, "Don't suggest such a mode to me of transmitting messages; I 

 am a practical man, sir, and I believe that the way to transmit a mes- 

 sage is to write it on paper, deliver it to a messenger, and put him on 

 horseback." In the next generation his successor would be a believer 

 in semaphores, and when the electrical telegraphist came to him and 

 said, " Do you know that I can transmit movement by invisible elec- 

 trical power through a wire, however long, and it seems to me that if 

 one were to make a code out of this movement I could speak to you at 

 Portsmouth at one end of the wire while I was in London at the other," 

 what would have been the answer of the practical man ? " Sir, I don't 

 believe in transmitting messages by an invisible agency ; I am a prac- 

 tical man, and I believe in semaphores, which I can see working." In 

 like manner when the Siemens' regenerative gas-furnace was introduced, 

 what said the practical man ? " Turn your coals into gas and burn 

 the gas, and then talk of regeneration ! I don't know what you mean 

 by regeneration, except in a spiritual sense. I am a practical man, and 

 if I want heat out of coals I put coals on to a fire and burn them ; " 

 and for fifteen years the practical man has been the bar to this most 

 enormous improvement in metallurgical operations. The practical man 

 is beginning slowly to yield with respect to these furnaces, because he 

 finds, as I have already said, that men of greater intelligence have now 

 in sufficiently large numbers adopted the invention to make a formi- 

 dable competition with persons who stolidly refuse to be improved. 

 The same practical man for years stood in the way of the development 

 of Bessemer steel. Now he has been compelled to become a convert. 

 I will not weary you by citing more instances ; but one knows, and 

 one's experience teaches one that this is the conduct of the so-called 

 practical man ; and his conduct arises not only from the cause which I 

 have given (his ignorance of the principles of his profession), but from 

 another one which I have had occasion to allude to when speaking 

 upon a different subject, and that is, you offend his pride when you 

 come to him and say, " Adopt such a plan ; it is an improvement on 

 the process you carry on." His instinct revolts at the notion that you, 

 a stranger, very likely his junior, and very probably, if the improve- 

 ment be an original and radical one, a person not even connected with 

 the trade to which that improvement relates, should dare to assert that 



