INTRODUCTION. 



.sorrows. In peace and war tfyey hold the first place : here to 

 destroy a hostile force or to increase the elements of defence or 

 resistance ; there, always fertile and helpful to man, to multiply and 

 make perfect the implements of work and industry. In every case 

 they enable us to live, and make the conditions of living more easy. 



If we wish to form a striking idea of the importance which 

 scientific applications have acquired during the last two centuries, 

 we have only to imagine some of them as not existing, so that 

 we should have to resort for the services they render us, to the 

 primitive ways of our fathers in ordinary industrial operations before 

 science was brought into play. Let us see what perturbations 

 would be introduced into society and into the lives of each of us 

 by this imaginary abolition of science, if such were possible. We 

 have now returned, then, not, let us say, to the time which pre- 

 ceded Papin and the invention of the steam-engine, but only to 

 that when the new machine, in an embryo state, was hidden away 

 in the mines of Cornwall, waiting to be transformed by the genius 

 of Watt. Thousands of workshops, three-fourths of their activity 

 having been set in motion by the steam-engine, are closed, or at 

 least they have to go back to their original implements, those 

 only known to them when they were, strictly speaking, simple 

 manufactories : the hand of the workman alone henceforward must 

 make the thousand things indispensable to our wants, which in 

 the present day the steam-engine produces with such astonishing 

 perfection and wonderful and therefore economical rapidity. 



In what an enormous proportion the industrial production of 

 the world would suddenly be reduced ! Take, for example, England. 

 At the present time the steam-engines on English soil and in English 

 manufactories have a mechanical power representing no less than 

 seventy-six millions of workmen, that is at least ten times the mus- 

 cular power of all the adult workmen who are the auxiliaries to 

 the machines. Where would men be found to carry on the enormous 

 work now done ? 



Let us extend this idea to all the manufacturing nations of the 

 globe, and then only shall we be able to judge of the famine of 

 manufactured goods, stuffs, clothes, tools, machines, and useful 

 products of all sorts, which would be brought about by such a 

 suppression as the one we have imagined. 



