Electricity 



are denied to vision however ingeniously for- 

 tified by the lens-maker. A brief outline of 

 photographic history will show a parallel to the 

 permutative impulse so conspicuous in the pro- 

 gress of electricity. At the points where the 

 electrician and the photographer collaborate 

 we shall note achievements such as only the 

 loftiest primal powers may evoke. 



A brief story of what electricity and its 

 necessary precursor, fire, have done and promise 

 to do for civilization, may have attraction in itself; 

 so, also, may a review, though most cursory, of 

 the work of the camera and all that led up to it : 

 for the provinces here are as wide as art and 

 science, and their bounds comprehend well-nigh 

 the entirety of human exploits. And between 

 the lines of this story w r e may read another 

 one which may tell us something of the earliest 

 stumblings in the dawn of human faculty. 

 When we compare man and his next of kin, we 

 find between the two a great gulf, surely the 

 widest betwixt any allied families in nature. 

 Can a being of intellect, conscience, and aspira- 

 tion have sprung at any time, however remote, 

 from the same stock as the orang and the chim- 

 panzee? Since 1859, when Darwin published 

 his ''Origin of Species," the theory of evolution 

 has become so generally accepted that to-day it 

 is little more assailed than the doctrine of gravi- 

 tation. And yet, while the average man of in- 

 telligence bows to the formula that all which 

 now exists has come from the simplest conceiv- 

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