CHAPTER XIV. 



GENERAL RESULTS. 



As a conducting thread through the maze of science 

 the brief outline we have given will suffice; but it is by 

 no means, as we have already said, a commensurate pre- 

 sentment of what science has accomplished. Yet, the 

 facts recorded, fractional though they be, constitute an 

 aggregate at once so weighty, pregnant, and substantial, 

 so vast, stupendous, and imperishable, that no one can 

 possibly appreciate and realise its full significance. We 

 need only remember that each discovery, each law, each 

 invention, is a new source of immeasurable development 

 to entire mankind, both intellectually and materially, to 

 form an idea, if not an estimate, of what science has done 

 for us. Chemistry, steam, electricity no sooner sprang into 

 life, than they became the greatest elements of progress 

 and wealth in the world. A man handles a crystal, gives 

 it a geometrical shape, polishes it; another man adapts it 

 to a tube, and, lo ! men see the same components as those 

 which make up the earth, burning in stars so remote that 

 a cannon ball would not reach them in ten millions of 

 years. A Bessemer makes a new kind of steel, a Perkin 

 finds a new kind of dye, and, behold, England reaps 

 millions upon millions, by scores and scores, and untold 

 wealth circulates throughout East and West : capital is 

 increased a hundredfold and labour is multiplied a thousand- 

 fold ! A Gilbert demonstrates a law which a Volta fructifies, 

 and, at once, the pile ensures progress by leaps and bounds 



