WHY PROGRESS IS Br LEAPS. 227 



This rapid survey of what electricity has done and yet may 

 do has shown it the creator of a thousand material resources : 

 the corner stone of physical generalization ; a stimulus to the 

 moral sense, by making what otherwise were an empty wish 

 rise to sympathy fulfilled ; while, in more closely binding up the 

 good of the bee with the welfare of the hive, it is an educator 

 and confirmer of every social bond. Are we not, then, justified 

 in holding electricity to be a multiplier of faculty and insight, 

 a means of dignifying mind and soul, unexampled since man first 

 kindled fire and rejoiced ? 



And the advances due to electricity have significance still 

 unexhausted. It was in 1800, on the threshold of the nineteenth 

 century, that Volta devised the first battery — the crown of cups. 

 In less than a hundred years the force then liberated has vitally 

 interwoven itself with every art and science, with fruitage not 

 to be imagined even by men of the stature of Watt, Lavoisier, 

 or Humboldt. Compare this rapidity of conquest with the slow 

 adaptation, through age after age, of fire to cooking, smelting, 

 tempering. Yet it was partly because the use of fire had drawn 

 out man's intelligence that he was ready so quickly to seize 

 upon electricity and subdue it. The principle of permutation, 

 illustrated in both victories, interprets not only the vast expan- 

 sion of human empire won by a new weapon of prime power, it 

 explains also why these accessions are brought under rule with 

 ever-accelerated pace. Every new talent but clears the way for 

 the talents newer still which are born from it. 



And a fresh mode of mastery entails other consequences well 

 worthy of remark. Suppose two contending armies face each 

 other, fairly matched, except that one has the telegraph and the 

 other has not. Which will win ? In less striking fashion, but 

 still decisively, must every factor of prime rank as it made its 

 appearance have told in the battles of early man. Let us turn 

 from discovery and invention to some consideration of the primi- 

 tive discoverer and inventor, and try to recall the epoch when his 

 inarticulate cries were becoming the rudiments of speech. Let 

 us imagine him a hunter returning to his fellows from a solitary 

 expedition. He tells that he saw a deer quench its thirst at a 

 brookside, but found the animal too fleet for his arrow ; how he 

 heard in the distance a bear's fierce growl, and fortunately came 

 upon a cave where he took refuge till the brute had passed. 

 Such a faculty of communication as this, even in its beginnings, 

 would give a tribe enjoying it an incalculable advantage over its 

 unspeaking kin. Speech makes the distant as if present in space, 

 makes the past as if present in time ; it is the first and most 

 signal step, therefore, by which man conquers both space and 

 time. No elephant or dog, however intelligent, has means to tell 



