SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION OF MECHANICS AND ARTISANS. 193 



Thiuk not tliat the canon of inventive genins is closed. It is but Jnst 

 opening. Agents may be slumbering unrecognized that shall supplant 

 those now in the ascendant. Steam — the sovereign of our time — may 

 yield the sceptre to a mightier energy. The power now obtained by 

 the holocaust of forests and the disemboweling of the solid earth may 

 be replaced by some one of those elementary forces which " spread 

 undivided, operate unspent." The general use of condensed air for pur- 

 poses of locomotion by land and water is now as probable as that ot 

 steam was a century ago; and Ericsson has advanced as far in the 

 former as all the predecessors of Fulton had done in the latter. IIow 

 know we that the electro-magnetic force which we have harnessed to 

 our thought may not one day be yoked to our railway trains? Who 

 can say that the pretended generation of light and heat for common 

 uses by the decomposition of water (the rumor of which, if I mistake 

 not, emanated from this very city,) while an audacious imposture, may 

 not have been an unintended prophecy? Who knows but that the still 

 deficient directing and impelling force may yet be so applied as to give 

 certainty and calculable utility to aerial navigation? Then, too, in 

 many of our established processes, machines, and modes of locomotion 

 there are still limitations, liabilities to accident, possibilities of added 

 speed or eflicacy, in fine, a thousand directions in which inventive talent 

 may be fruitfully busy. Xor is there any invention, however insignifi- 

 cant it may seem, which multiplied, as it may be, by thousands or mil- 

 lions, and extending into an indefinite future, may not carry with it an 

 untold saving of cost and labor, and in many cases, even of life. The 

 invention which in the least degree facilitates industry, and increases 

 and cheapens its products, is a benefaction to society which will im- 

 measurably outweigh and outlast the most munificent gifts that wealth 

 can bestow. It is by such charities that many of you, I trust, will elo 

 honor to your calling as liberally-educated artisans. 



Permit me now brielly to advert to the need which our country has 

 of institutions like yours. Nothing is more evident than the over- 

 crowding, at the present time, of every department of commerce. Up 

 to a certain point commerce is, like the mechanic arts, a creative pro- 

 fession. A commodity is not a finished product till it is brought within 

 easy reach of its consumer, and the merchants — wholesale and retail — 

 who are needed for the successive stages between the producer and the 

 consumer are to that extent co-agents in the production, as are also the 

 bankers and brokers who supply the necessary funds and facilitate the 

 essential pecuniary arrangements. But when members of the mercan- 

 tile profession are so needlessly multiplied that they create supernu- 

 merary stages in the passage of goods from the producer to the con- 

 sumer, interpose to arrest instead of facilitating their transfer, levy 

 black-mail on every coinmodity in the market, and get for themselves 

 the lion's share in its ultimate i)rice, they then inflict a grievous wrong 

 on both parties — they make their superfluous profit on the spoils of 

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