FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTIONS 537 



culties of the steam-engine or saved its vineyards to France. We 

 shall restrict our admiration, I say, and try to discover the con- 

 trolling ideas which were common to all, and which impelled the 

 directors of these great enterprises along such apparently diverse 

 paths. 



We may notice especially three of these ideas. In the first place, 

 these men must have observed that nature works in no arbitrary 

 manner, but by fixed laws; that while the earth remaineth, seed- 

 time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and 

 day and night, shall not cease. 



Secondly, they must have perceived that, as Reuleaux points out, 

 if these laws could be brought into the right relation with us, or 

 rather, if we could bring ourselves into the right relation with them 

 into the line of their working we might hope to be able to gear 

 our small machines to the vast wheel of nature, and make it do for us 

 what we could never do for ourselves. 



A recent writer has asked us to recognize in certain inventions of 

 man extra-organic sense-organs ; to see a projection of the human eye 

 in the telescope and the microscope, which so marvelously extend 

 our vision that it can resolve the misty light of the far-off nebulae 

 into suns, or discern in a clod of clay a world of wonder; to hear in 

 the telegraph and the telephone the tones of the human voice so 

 intensified as to reach round the world, and in the printed page the 

 silent voices of long past generations; to know the express train and 

 the ocean liner as extensions of our locomotor- mechanism; and to 

 discover in a tool or a lever the human arm grown strong enough 

 to perform seeming miracles. 



Thirdly, these master-minds must have realized that in the study 

 of the laws of nature, and in the attempt to put ourselves into touch 

 with them, there would certainly be revealed more and more of what 

 seem to be tlie infinite possibilities of our environment. 



In almost every endeavor to explain the nature of observed 

 phenomena, fresh and important facts emerge which in their turn 

 call for explanation. This is true, for instance, of the investigations 

 in radio-activity now being carried out by Professor Rutherford, in 

 which the deductions are so novel and startling that it would have 

 been impossible beforehand to have made any prediction as to their 

 character. Again, what a vista has already been opened up by the 

 interaction of the sciences! What a great development, for example, 

 has taken place in electro-metallurgy, due entirely to the processes 

 made possible by a combination of physics and chemistry, and based 

 upon Faraday's well-known law of electrolysis! 



The first and second of these conceptions, namely, that law is a 

 fixed thing, and that if we and our work could be brought into the 

 right relationship with the laws of nature, they would expend their 



