SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 495 



prevailing with their attendant trouble, uncleanliness, dust, vexa- 

 tion, and disease. And should electro-technics succeed — as there 

 is well-founded hope that it will — in solving the problem of obtain- 

 ing electricity direct from the fuel, instead of by an expensive indirect 

 method as heretofore, the far-reaching effect of such success can 

 scarcely be overestimated. As with respect to material progress 

 this century is fittingly called the Century of Steam, so most likely 

 the coming century will have to be designated the Century of Elec- 

 tricity, when the more extended control of the forces of Nature by 

 the human mind shall have taken an immense stride in the forward 

 direction. If we add to all this that the grand material as well as 

 intellectual development of the great land of liberty in the far West 

 of our globe, the like of which has never been seen before, promises 

 to continue in the same or even a higher degree, then the men of the 

 coming century will of necessity be more profoundly impressed than 

 the children of the present by the achievements of human intellect 

 and human power. 



It may be that we are, with respect to the coming century, in 

 the same immature mental condition in which the people of the 

 eighteenth century were with regard to the nineteenth. If some 

 one in the preceding century had dared to predict the wonderful 

 achievements of the nineteenth, he would probably have been de- 

 clared a fool, and treated as was Robert Mayer, in Germany, in this 

 century, who, after the discovery of the law of the conservation of 

 force, was put into an insane asylum. A like fate might befall the 

 man who should dare now to cast a horoscope for the twentieth cen- 

 tury, and to predict the progress of the human mind in the various 

 domains of scientific research. After all, those may be right who, 

 in spite of all those acquisitions on which we so justly pride our- 

 selves, are of opinion that we are still moving in only the initial 

 steps, in the leading strings of evolution, and that we are yet very 

 far from the goal of those material and ideal aims which the human 

 race in its unremitting onward struggle is destined to attain, or to 

 show its capacity of attaining. The great Sir Isaac Newton used, 

 perhaps, the most appropriate simile when he compared men with 

 children who on the seashore are picking up here and there a curious 

 pebble or colored shell while the great sea of truth lies still unex- 

 plored before them. We can only conjecture as to the probable 

 progress, as we can not know which position we occupy in the course 

 ' of human evolution, whether we are still in its beginnings or well 

 advanced. This lies hidden in the bosom of the future. We there- 

 fore discontinue this line of thought, and remark here again that 

 unfortunately this great progress in knowledge and power in our 

 century has not extended to the moral, general intellectual, literary, 



