THE SPIRIT-RAPPERS 



This advance in knowledge of the world about us 

 strikes different minds in differing ways. For some 

 it is but an earnest of what is to come. What has 

 been acquired is little ; our present ideas will appear 

 absurd enough a century hence. Before Oersted 

 we had no thought of the intimate relations be- 

 tween electricity and magnetism ; a single fortunate 

 observation makes possible the telegraph and binds 

 together distant continents. Until Faraday came, 

 with his extraordinary powers as an experimenter, 

 no one so much as dreamed of winning vast stores 

 of electricity from spinning magnets ; to-day an in- 

 dustry whose invested capital amounts to hundreds 

 of millions rests upon his discovery. Before Ront- 

 gen, we had no conceivable means of lighting the 

 interior of our bodies; before Hertz, no suspicion 

 that we might signal hundreds of miles without 

 wires; before Morton, no hopes of anaesthesia; be- 

 fore Wohler, that we might one day fabricate liv- 

 ing substances in the laboratory. Who, then, 

 shall set bounds the upon possibilities of human 

 achievement? 



We know well the fate of the prophets of bank- 

 ruptcy. Within a few years after Comte had an- 

 nounced that astronomy had reached its utmost 

 limits, that nothing new could be expected there, 

 Kirchhoff stood trembling in his laboratory before 

 his splendid discovery of the powers of the spec- 



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