880 PROPOSED APPLICATIONS OF SMITHSON's BEQUEST. 



exists. The philosophy of Verulam has created a uew race 

 of mortals — a race utterly different, both in physical power 

 and in intellectual refinement, from all other animals on the 

 face of the earth. Each year, as it passes, is rapidly increas- 

 ing the difference. One after another, we are subjecting the 

 imponderable and unseen agents of Nature to our use — Heat, 

 Electricity, Light. Men that are thus arming themselves 

 with the force of these elements are not like the former in- 

 habitants of the globe. We ask not the Egyptian for his 

 fleetest dromedary ; our locomotives run over a whole degree 

 of the earth's surface in a single hour. We need not the 

 elephant of India to drag our ships ashore; our steam engines 

 give us possession of power that is literally unbounded. We 

 want not the Tartar with his swift Arab, for our electric 

 telegraph can transmit our words from one pole to the other 

 in the twenty-fifth part of a second. At our command the 

 beams of the sun become artists, and paint on the plates of 

 Daguerre scenes which the pencil of Apelles could never 

 have approached — landscapes inimitably beyond those that 

 adorn the canvass of Claude Lorraine. To send us to school 

 to antiquity is to degrade us indeed. The prattle of children 

 is no instruction to him that is bursting into manhood. 



Who can predict what the course of a few years shall ac- 

 complish? The man who is grasping in his hand the agents 

 with which it pleases the Almighty to govern this world — 

 who has made for himself an eye that reaches into the deep 

 abysses of space, and sees the circling of star around star, in 

 regions which the eye of an angel alone could pierce — whose 

 splendid intellect compares together the weights of those 

 indivisible atoms — those last particles of which the Creator 

 has formed all material things, or places the sun in a bal- 

 ance — the man who, instead of indulging in chimerical 

 speculations about the structure of his own mind, of which 

 he is in utter ignorance, is adding to himself new senses 

 which are unlike those that nature has given him, and ex- 

 panding his organs to the production of results which his 

 unassisted powers could never have approached — this is not 

 the man who existed five centuries ago. There is found in 

 the bowels of the earth, as geologists say, abundant evidence 

 of a continuous development of the tribes of organized life — 

 that those which first made their appearance were of the 

 lower and meaner kind — that one after another has come 

 into existence, each more elaborate and each more intel- 

 lectual than its predecessors. The history of our own family 

 teaches us the same thing, for there is not more diflerence 

 between those animal races than there is between the civil- 



