SOUTH SEA BUBBLES IN SCIENCE. 405. 



that electricity miglit afford an economical method of treating large 

 quantities of water, is reticent in regard to such a scheme, while 

 the electrician, ignorant of chemistry, is ready to concede that the 

 chemists may have found a cheap extractor, so the promoter can 

 play the chemist against the electrician, and there is no arbitrator in 

 sight. The American is peculiarly in peril from the absence of a 

 large body of men trained in technical science, such as exist in Ger- 

 many. He also has been unduly excited, and his desire for love of 

 sudden wealth stimulated by phenomenal successes. The commer- 

 cial triumph of the telephone has led to a multitude of scientific 

 bubbles, and has resulted, like the discovery of gold in the Klon- 

 dike, in a rush into electrical schemes which have been held up to 

 a hungry crowd of victims as second only to the Bell telephone. 



While the telegraph and the telephone can prevent speculations 

 like the South Sea Bubble in a great measure, for such schemes 

 were much aided by a lack of a general dissemination of intelli- 

 gence, and this lack is supplied by a quick interchange of knowl- 

 edge, they bring their own peculiar peril, for they are examples 

 of what profit may be reaped from discovery in the world of science. 

 The commercial enterprises of the world have been brought within 

 reach of the many by the telegraph and telephone. They no longer 

 belong to the few, while the successful working of the field of sci- 

 ence is still confined to a minority and the general public; even 

 the cultivated people are very ignorant of the approaches to the 

 New El Dorado. !N^o bogus land scheme or salted mining enter- 

 prise can be kept in existence to-day for a long period; but the 

 Iveeley motor, with its ethereal vibrations and its pseudo-molecular 

 motions, was limited in activity only by the life of the promoter. 

 Instead of the alchemists we have the seekers after power, which 

 costs nothing, and in the train of the honest inventor there are 

 unscrupulous promoters ready to capitalize any remarkable new 

 fact or discovery which attracts public attention. 



I have mentioned the influence of the first Duchess of Marl- 

 borough in inducing her husband, the great duke, to sell out his 

 shares in the South Sea Bubble when they had risen to a high value 

 because this example of discrimination and prudence in a woman 

 supports one in the belief that all women are not prone to invest 

 in women's bank schemes, in Keeley motors, or in enterprises for 

 " carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to 

 know what it is." One of my friends recently visited the office 

 of a company which proposed to produce power without the expend- 

 iture of a due amount of energy, and found among those anxious 

 to invest a woman who said that she had just received a di^ddend 

 from the company for "extracting gold from salt water, and she was 



