2i6 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



banks being required to redeem daily such, of its notes as are pre- 

 sented for that purpose. 



And this last reference to the Canadian banking system gives 

 rise again to the thought that perhaps, if there could yet be 

 adopted in the United States a banking system modeled upon 

 something of the same plan as that of Canada, it would give the 

 nation more relief than could any other step that is now at all 

 practicable in connection with monetary issue. Such a system 

 would provide within safe limits the abundance of currency that 

 the farmer and the laborer struggling for a livelihood in the 

 West and Southwest are led by fallacious reasoning to believe 

 can only be obtained by the free coinage of silver. 



WHY PROGRESS IS BY LEAPS. 



By GEOKGE ILES. 



AS master of electricity man is crowned the king of Nature. 

 - A brief glance at what electricity has done and promises to 

 do may have interest in itself ; it may have yet more in disclos- 

 ing the law by which art and science march onward with ever- 

 hastened pace, how it comes about that the history of modern 

 progress is little else than a story of revolution. We shall see 

 that the subjugation of electricity means for thought and work 

 not an addition merely, but a multiplier. It marries the resources 

 of the mechanic, the engineer, the chemist, the artist, with issue 

 attested by all its own fertility, while it annexes province after 

 province unimagined before its advent. Because the latest up- 

 ward stride in knowledge and faculty has fallen to the lot of the 

 electrician, he has broadened the scientific horizon vastly more 

 than any earlier explorer ; beyond any predecessor he has found 

 more in the field wherewith to prove the fecundity that infallibly 

 stamps every supremely great agent of discovery. As we trace a 

 few of the unending interlacements of electrical science and art 

 with other sciences and arts, we shall be reminded of a series of 

 permutations where the newest of the factors, because newest, 

 multiplies all the factors that went before by an unexampled 

 leap.* We shall find reason to believe that this is not merely 

 probable, but really is as a tendency true, and not alone of the 



* Permutations of two elements, 1 and 2, are (1 x 2) two : 1, 2 ; 2, 1 ; or a, b ; b, a. 

 Of three elements the permutations are (1 x 2 x 3) six : 1, 2, 3 ; 1, 3, 2 ; 2, 1, 3 ; 2, 3, 1 ; 

 3, 1, 2 ; 3, 2, 1 ; or a, b, c ; a, c, b ; b, a, c ; b, c, a ; c, a, b ; c, b, a. Of four elements the 

 permutations are (1x2x3x4) twenty-four ; of five elements, one hundred and twenty, and 

 so on. A new element or permutator multiplies by an increasing figure all the permutations 

 it finds. 



