THE APOTHEOSIS OF STEAM. 431 



machine came into use deserves to rank as the leading era in history ; 

 and that it demands from us more study than either of the preceding 

 ages of the press, iron, bronze, or stone, though they lasted much 

 longer and have heretofore occupied much greater prominence in his- 

 torical study. 



Modern civilization belongs to the Euraryan the Teutonic, Latin, 

 Celtic, Slavonic and Greek nationalities which migrated from Asia 

 in the remote past to Europe, whence some of them passed over to 

 other parts of the world, carrying their culture, their energy, and 

 their high capacity for further progress, with them. The Asiatics, the 

 Africans, and the aboriginal Americans and Polynesians, have for the 

 last four centuries acted a part so subordinate in the great drama of 

 human advancement, that they are like the shadows of a picture j they 

 serve mainly as contrasts to bring out the brilliancy of the forms and 

 colors in the light. 



The age of steam the period between 1770 and 1875 has trebled 

 the Euraryans who have given us the enlightenment of the present, 

 and are the hope of the future. Their number a hundred years ago 

 was probably 120,000,000; though Gibbon, in the sixty-second note 

 to the second chapter of his " Decline and Fall," following Voltaire, 

 who was a respectable authority, said that Europe then had 107,000,000 

 inhabitants, including twenty-two in Germany, twenty in France, 

 twelve in Russia, ten in Italy, eight in Spain and Portugal, eight in 

 Great Britain and Ireland, seven in Scandinavia, as many more in 

 Turkey, and four each in Hungary and the Netherlands. The facilities 

 for getting information then were not so good as now, and, though 

 Gibbon was very careful in his statements, yet he probably made a 

 mistake in his figures. Kolb, in his "Hand-book of Comparative 

 Statistics " (German, and not translated), tells us that France had 

 22,500,000 in 1770, Spain nine and one-third in 1768, Germany thirty 

 in 1786, and Italy twenty in 1812; and Levi, in his "History of 

 British Commerce," credits Great Britain and Ireland with ten in 

 1763. After excluding certain nationalities not of Aryan blood in 

 Europe, and adding the British and Spanish colonists in America, we 

 may estimate the total number of Euraryans in 1770 at 120,000,000. 

 The present number is about 360,000,000, including three hundred 

 in Europe, and forty-eight in North America. This great increase, 

 far from being a necessary or natural result of the lapse of time, 

 is entirely unexampled. The Roman Empire had about 120,000,000 

 inhabitants, and the same territory after a lapse of eighteen cen- 

 turies had no more. Egypt 3,000 years ago, and Peru and Mexico 

 before the Spanish conquest, had more inhabitants than now. As a 

 general rule, population has been nearly stationary; century after 

 century has passed, with little difference until we come within the 

 magic influence of steam, and then suddenly the Euraryan race, ac- 

 quiring the power to draw larger crops from the soil, to distribute 



