14 ADDRESS TO THE FAKMEKS OF TEXAS. 



enlightened descendant and successor, all this is changed. Water, 

 wind, steam, supply the needed power ; his task is to mold and guide 

 that power to beneficent ends. In my boyhood, the man who cut 

 an acre of heavy grass did therein a good day's work, which taxed 

 his physical energies to the utmost and sent him weary and exhaust- 

 ed to bed, to rise stiff and sore for the morrow's duties ; now, any 

 intelligent, resokite girl of fifteen, guiding a span of horses, may cut 

 five aci'es of just such grass before noon, cut it better than the best 

 mower ever did, and alight from her seat on the mowing-machine 

 untired and eager for a pic-nic or frolic after dinner. Steam saws 

 wood into fuel for the kitchen fire-place and the parlor stove ; cuts 

 stalks and straw into half-inch pieces and then cooks them into a 

 pulpy mass ; slices roots ; churns cream into butter without super- 

 vision ; and is jvist harnessing itself to the plow, resolved to pulve- 

 rize the soil more rapidly, more cheaply, to a gi-eater depth, to a 

 more equal and perfect comminution, than it has ever been possible 

 to attain by the force of animal power. Manifestly, we stand but 

 on the threshold of the new age whereof Steam is at once the har- 

 binger and the impulse : but enough has been developed to assure 

 us that more and better is at hand. 



Nor should we doubt that Steam itself is the forerunner of agen- 

 cies still more potent and more cheaply efficacious. Mighty as have 

 been its achievements, they only serve to render more obvious and 

 lamentable its limitations. Of the power actually generated by the 

 vaporization of water, I cannot say how great is the share utilized 

 by an ordinary steam-engine, but I believe the estimates of scientists 

 all range below twenty per cent. Then the enormous weight of 

 boiler, fuel, and water, that mvist be transported with every form of 

 locomotive, absorbs nearly half the power not squandered by imper- 

 fect devices for directing and applying it. Mighty as Steam assur- 

 edly is, it is not only a blind giant, but lae are deplorably blind 

 with regard to its economy and adaptation. 



And why should Steam, even in its best estate, be final ? In- 

 telligence has already spurned its trammels ; Thought has far out- 

 stripped it in the invention and operation of the Magnetic Tele- 

 grai)h ; why should the wondrous power we have evoked in Elec- 

 tricity be limited to the transmission of ideas ? Why may it not 

 be employed to impel material substances as well ? True, we have 

 not yet learned how to transmit the power unquestionably generat- 

 ed by Electricity ; but our average ignorance and incapacity, result- 



