210 HAMPSHIRE, FRANKLIN, AND 



ply the wants, alleviate the miseries, ornament the passage, 

 and illustrate the progress of human life. 



The arts are the servants of science and commerce. They 

 are the common carriers and agents of the world. Does science 

 want a pearl or a coral from the ocean's bed, the arts are sent 

 to bring them ; does she want the ore or the gem from the 

 mines and rock-beds of the earth, the industrial hand of art 

 must sink the shaft and cleave the rock to bring them to the 

 surface. Does she want sweet water a thousand feet deep in 

 the strata of the earth, art bores and brings up the sparkling 

 stream in Artesian wells. Does commerce want messengers, 

 art cuts down the forest oak, brings his limbs and binds and 

 curves them into the ribbed sides and lofty bulwarks of an 

 ocean ship, within whose deep cavity, snugly stowed, floats the 

 merchandise of nations. The arts dig the rude ore from the 

 mountain, they melt it and mould it ; they beat it and trend it, 

 and work it into form and fashion ; and when it is furnished, 

 garnished and bound in steel-mail and harness, they breathe into 

 his lungs the vapory breath of steam, and drive upon his track 

 the iron-clad horse, swifter than the chariots of Aminadab, 

 and fiercer than the dragon of the Apocalypse. Does thought 

 want an express, at the slightest signal a courier leaps upon the 

 electric chain, and quick as thought, and swifter than light, 

 bears from Washington, to the extremities of the land, the sad 

 tidings that " a President dies," ere yet the hand is cold or the 

 heart has ceased to beat. 



The two leading facts which mark our age. and are destined 

 to stamp its character in the history of human progress, are the 

 spirit of bold inquiry and the hand of daring experiment. 

 United, they form a tremendous magnet, around which cluster, 

 with irresistible tendency, and arrange themselves with unde- 

 viating obedience, the mental and mechanical forces which are 

 evolving and working out the problem of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury. They tend to one great and universal result ; inspire 

 the mind with one single ambition, the mastery of nature. 

 The experimental sciences, and their application in the mechanic 

 arts, are as infinitely various and extensive as they are astonish- 

 ing, when viewed as the result of human discovery. The spiri; 



