404 BRAIN WORK AND 



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moment, starts with a very few settled facts 

 at his disposal. The scientific facts taken into 

 account for inventing the steam-engine, or the 

 telegraph, or the phonograph were strikingly 

 elementary. So that we can affirm that what 

 we presently know is already sufficient for 

 resolving any of the great problems which 

 stand in the order of the day prime-motors 

 without the use of steam, the storage of energy, 

 the transmission of force, or the flying-machine. 

 If these problems are not yet solved, it is 

 merely because of the want of inventive genius, 

 the scarcity of educated men endowed with it, 

 and the present divorce between science and 

 industry.* On the one side, we have men who 

 are endowed with capacities for invention, but 

 have neither the necessary scientific knowledge 

 nor the means for experimenting during long 

 years ; and, on the other side, we have men 

 endowed with knowledge and facilities for ex- 

 perimenting, but devoid of inventive genius, 

 owing to their education, too abstract, too 

 scholastic, too bookish, and to the surroundings 

 they live in not to speak of the patent 

 system, which divides and scatters the efforts of 

 the inventors instead of combining them.f 



* I leave on purpose these lines as they were In the first 

 edition. All these desiderata are already accomplished facts. 



f The same remark ought to be made as regards the soci- 

 ologists, and still more so the economists. What are most of 



