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just begun. Nature is exceedingly opulent in her forces and resources, but 

 man has gained but an imperfect mastery over them. He has been too 

 idle to learn her secrets, too much enfeebled in mind and body by his 

 vices to assert his sovereignty, and too much occupied with war and blood- 

 shed to cultivate the arts of peace. He has abdicated his throne and sold 

 his birthright for a mess of pottage. Just in proportion as Christianity 

 has put down the vices of man and taught him self-government, has he in 

 his turn subjugated the forces and elements about him. And yet he has 

 only taken the outposts and frontiers of his domain, and there remaineth 

 much land to be possessed. He has only entered the vestibule of the sanc- 

 tuary of Nature. Her innermost veils have not yet been lifted. The forces 

 he has subdued are only partially tamed — only imperfectly broken to har- 

 ness. His best steam engine wastes 85 per cent of the power of the steam, 

 and his most perfect mechanical contrivance loses by friction one half of the 

 power applied. Who can doubt that the next fifty years will witness far 

 greater triumphs of mechanical and inventive genius than the last fifty 

 years have seen? These wonders are but a prophecy and a hint of the 

 solution of Nature's ultimate secrets and the utilization of her forces which 

 are in store for mankind. As the dreams of the past are but the actuali- 

 ties of the present, so the achievements of the future will surpass our wildest 

 flights of imagination. Forty-two years ago Professor Low, of St. Joseph 

 College, Bardstown, Kentucky, was committed to the insane asylum 

 because he predicted that a railroad would be built from the Atlantic to 

 the Pacific. "We may imagine that there is nothing left to be done, but as 

 Emerson said: "Nothing has been done by men that cannot be better 

 done." I have no doubt that there are powers in nature more swift than 

 the silent feet of electricity which now speed along those webs of iron which 

 are woven like a network of nerves over all lands and under all seas. Some 

 power greater than the steam engine will yet be discovered which will 

 carry products from the producer to the consumer in the twinkling of an 

 eye, and bring the families of man together in such close neighborhood 

 and brotherhood as to make possible "that parliament of nations, that 

 federation of the world," of which Tennyson prophesied. Wait until man 

 can handle steam not only as he can to-day, but in its superheated condi- 

 tion in which it possesses the tremendous force of dynamite itself. The 

 time will come, I suppose, when the Gatling and Parrott guns and the 

 Winchester rifles of to-day, supplanted by more perfect arms, will retire to 

 rest and rust beside the flint-lock muskets and the cross-bows of antiquity. 

 Some marvel of mechanism will yet supplant the sewing machine and 

 clothe our descendants with more than the glory of Solomon, and with 

 scarcely more labor than that put forth by the lilies of the field, which toil 

 not, neither do they spin. The steamship, it may be, will yet rot at the 

 dock, set aside by airships, those "argosies with magic sails, pilots of the 

 purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales," and the locomotive be 

 cast aside with the creaking and toiling prairie schooners, steered by the 

 argonaut of '49 across the wind-swept desert, to make room for the pneu- 

 matic or electric railway. 



Take for example the solar energy which, by evaporation, draws up 

 three thousand million tons of water three and one half miles every min- 

 ute, expending a force equal to two thousand seven hundred and fifty-seven 

 million horse-power. Ericsson's solar engine condenses the solar rays on 

 a space ten feet square, and enough force is generated by them to run an 

 engine of eight and one half horse-power ten hours a day. Enough solar 

 energy is being wasted all around us to do all the work of the world, and 

 man will yet hitch his wagon to the sun and give it a harder work to do 



