256 EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 
agencies are resorted to, they can be established where 
once they would not have paid; materials are em- 
ployed which the cost of transportation would once 
have made inaccessible; great commercial houses at 
distant points supersede small ones near at hand, while 
vast sections of farming and grazing country are brought 
near to metropolitan markets thousands of miles off ; 
and thus in these various ways the tendency is to 
specialize industries in the places where they can best 
be conducted. The net result is a marked increase 
in the comfort of the great mass of people. A given 
amount of human effort can secure a much greater 
number of the products of industry, so that life is on 
its material side variously enriched. 
But there are other ways of creating motor energy 
besides utilizing the expansive force of steam. Almost 
hand in hand with the development of the steam engine 
has gone the progress of electric discovery from Galvani 
and Volta to Faraday, calling into existence a number 
of astounding inventions and introducing us to a new 
chamber in the temple of knowledge of which we have 
doubtless barely crossed the threshold. I need not 
enlarge upon the telephone, the phonograph, the use 
of electricity for lighting and heating, but a word may 
be said concerning electricity as a source of motor 
power on a great scale. What would men have said 
a century ago to the idea of harnessing the stupendous 
gravitative force of Niagara Falls into the service of 
manufactories in the city of Buffalo, simply by turning 
it into electricity and distributing it on wires over miles 
of country? Yet at that time one of the greatest of 
American thinkers, Benjamin Thompson of Woburn, 
better known as Count Rumford, was leading the way 
