APPLETONS' 



POPULAR SCIENCE 



MOl^THLY. 



FEBRUARY, 1900. 



SOUTH SEA BUBBLES IN SdENCE. 



By Prof. JOHN TROWBRIDGE, 



DIRECTOE OF JEFFERSON PHYSICAL LABORATORY, HARVARD UNIVERSITT. 



THE advances in science lead to hopes of tlie sudden accumu- 

 lation of gold, just as tlie discovery of new worlds led our 

 ancestors to invest in many inflated enterprises of commerce and 

 conquest. This older temptation has passed away, for there are 

 no new worlds to discover, and this small globe has been practically 

 staked out; but the mysterious domains of science are still illimit- 

 able, and afford vast opportunities for inflated schemes which have 

 their prototype in the South Sea Bubble. 



Let us refresh our memory of this surprising delusion. It arose 

 in the reign of Queen Anne, nearly one hundred and eighty years 

 ago, and when we consider the extent of the speculation and gam- 

 bling which it caused and the number of those who lost everything 

 and who consigned their families to bitter poverty, we are tempted 

 to class it with those other calamities which preceded it and which 

 afflicted England so heavily— ^the great fire of London and the 

 plague. The South Sea Company claimed to have enormous 

 sources of profit in certain exclusive privileges, obtained from the 

 Spanish Government, for trading in their possessions in South 

 America and Mexico; and it may be well for us in these times of 

 the flotation of schemes for obtaining gold from salt water and 

 from sands, of power from air and something more ethereal than • 

 air, to be reminded of the many bubbles that came into existence 

 and burst at the time of the collapse of the Soiith Sea Bubble. 



The stock of the South Sea Company rose from one hundred 

 to a thousand, and an army of future victims crowded the offices of 



VOL. LVI. — 31 



