THE BIRTH OF INVENTION.* 



Bv Otis T. Mason. 



In this apotlieosis of iuveutioii uml iiiveutors, to me lias been assigned 

 tlie pleasing task of leading you baelc for a few moments to the cradle 

 of humanity. Those are happy hours to most of us when we recall the 

 days of childhood. To trace the lives of celebrated men and women 

 to the springs of their moral and intellectual power brings never-fading 

 delight. To study tlie rise and progress of a nation or any social unit 

 is worthy of exalted minds. But the most profitable inquiry of all is 

 the search for the origin of epoch-making ideas in order to comprehend 

 the history of civilization, to conjure up those race memories in which 

 each people transmits to itself and to posterity its former experiences. 



Every invention of any importance is the nursery of future inven- 

 tions, the cradle of a sleeping Hercules. But my task is to si)eak of 

 primitive man and his eftbrts. 



It will aid us in prosecuting our Journey backward to orient ourselves 

 with reference to the present. For two days we have listened to the 

 eloquent papers of my i)redcces.sors, Avritten to glorify the nineteenth 

 century. Through this faculty of invention the whole earth is man's. 

 There is not a lone island tit for his abode whereon sonu' Alexander 

 Selkirk has not made a home. Every mineral, plant, and animal is so 

 far known that a place has been found for it in his ^i/stcma Nafura'. 

 Every creature is subject to man; the wiiuU, the seas, the sunshine, 

 the lightning do his bidding. Projecting his vision Itcyond his tiny 

 planet, this inxeiitiiig animal has catalogued and traced the motion of 

 every star. 



But his crowning glory (which always tills me with admiration) is his 

 ever increasing comprehensiveness. After centuries of cultivating 

 acquaintance with the discrete phenomena around him, he has now 

 striven to coordinate them, to make them organic, to icad system into 

 them. He has learned by degrees to comjjrehend all things as parts of 

 a single mechanism. 8ir Isaac Newton and Kepler conceiNcd all objects 

 and all worlds to b(i held by univ«'rsal gravitation. ^Vnd thus, in our 

 century, von Baer and Humboldt taught that the world, in all its forces 



* An address on the occasion of the centennial celelnation of tlic dij^anization of 

 the U. S. Patent Oltice; delivered in Washiniiton. Vrovcvd'nxjn kikI .iddrcsuvK, 181(1, 

 pp. 403-412. 



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