ADDRESSES OF MAJOR LACEY 269 



The last sublime discovery of the century is the X-ray. 

 It is an old adage that any one could see as far into the 

 millstone as the man who picks it. Now opaque sub- 

 stances are beginning to yield their secrets to the scrutiny 

 of human eyes, and the skeleton of a living Corbett has 

 been as plainly photographed as that of a man who died 

 ten years ago. 



Edison with his phonograph catches the music of a 

 complete band and records it upon a cylinder with a point 

 no larger than that of a pin and the record yields back 

 all the notes of the complicated tune that has just been 

 played. 



Cuvier took a single bone and from it reconstructed 

 the entire skeleton of an extinct animal. And who knows 

 but that the X-rays, gathered from a remote star, Mars 

 for example, may not be enlarged and reproduced with a 

 living picture of the occupants of the distant planet. 



But let us leave Mars and come back again to Iowa, our 

 own loved state — the state of our birth or of our adop- 

 tion. Within the memory of living men, now present, 

 has this splendid commonwealth grown from a feeble ter- 

 ritory to a state of two million souls, with the lowest 

 percentage of illiteracy of any people on the globe. Her 

 prairies are dotted with four hundred thousand homes, 

 and a happy home has been well said to be a suburb of 

 heaven. 



The deadly cyclone, which fifty years ago played harm- 

 lessly over the prairie, now finds the home of our people 

 lying in its path, and death follows in its track. The 

 wind that at one time toys with the tresses of a child or 

 coaxes open the budding rose rises to the fury of the 

 tiger and sweeps with devouring energy over the fairest 

 land under the sun. 



But death lurks everywhere, and in Russia the festivi- 

 ties of a coronation slew more than all the tornadoes that 



