296 PROGRESS OF SCIENCE. 



merchant transacts a hundred times more business than his 

 father, but of the trade, he only deals in a couple of branches. 

 The other branches are taken up probably by the men who, 

 without that division of labour, would be his own salaried clerks. 

 This division of labour has just been explained in detail in 

 order to show the reader how men, who otherwise would 

 have remained unproductive trade units (clerks), have 

 become productive springs for the fructification of capital, 

 and the expansion and remuneration of labour. The con- 

 sumer, meanwhile, is the chief benefiter of the vast 

 improvement effected by electricity, for he obtains cheaper 

 food at an almost uniform rate without the fear of having to 

 face either famine or famine prices. If India and Russia 

 suffer from these two evils still, it is due to the comparative 

 absence of our means scientific appliances, railway and 

 telegraphic communication. 



What is the case as regards electricity is the case with 

 every scientific discovery, with more or less general conse- 

 quences. The man who makes one is a benefactor to the 

 whole of mankind. He provides for the existence of ten 

 thousand, a hundred thousand, a million of families ; he gives 

 life to a whole population. Photography, steel-making, 

 chemical manufacture, and so forth, are so many sources from 

 which flow untold wealth, well-being, and peace, in a con- 

 tinuous and ever more powerful stream. That is why 

 chemists like Lavoisier, Davy, Dalton, Liebig, Perkin; 

 electricians like Volta, Ampere, Wheatstone, Morse, Thom- 

 son, Edison; physicists like Faraday, Brewster, Kirchhoff, 

 Grove; experimentalists like Watt, Murdoch, Niepce, 

 Bessemer ; engineers like Fulton, Stephenson, Lesseps ; 

 physiologists like Harvey, Jenner, Huxley, Pasteur, together 

 with their scientific brethren in any branch, are more glorious 

 and deserving of fame, each of them, than the greatest 

 conquerors whose deeds are the subject of historians for 

 conquerors, even those who spread civilisation, have destroyed 

 thousands and hundreds of thousands of lives, whereas 

 men of science have given life to millions and millions : a 

 theme -for reflection this, and one which necessarily makes us 

 lovers of science and its promoters. 



