MAN AND NATURE 



newest era as compassing only the period of a single 

 life. There are men living to-day who were born in 

 that epoch when the steam engine was for the first 

 time used to turn the wheels of factories. There are 

 many men who can well remember the first practical 

 application of steam to railway traffic. Hosts of men 

 can remember when the first commercial message was 

 transmitted by electricity along a wire. Even middle- 

 aged men recall the first cable message that linked the 

 old world with the new. And the application of the 

 dynamo to the purposes of the world's work is an affair 

 of but yesterday. 



The historian of the future, casting his eye back across 

 the long perspective of history, will find civilized man 

 pursuing an even and unbroken course across the 

 ages from the time of the pyramids of Egypt to about 

 the time of the French Revolution. There will be 

 no dearth of incident to claim his attention in the way 

 of ^wars and conquests, and changing creeds, and the rise 

 and fall of nations, each pursuing virtually the same 

 course of growth and decay as all the others. But when 

 he comes to the close of the eighteenth century, it will 

 not be the social paroxysm of a nation, or the meteoric 

 career of a Napoleon that will claim his attention so 

 much as the introduction of that new method of utiliz- 

 ing the powers of Nature which found its expression in 

 the mechanism called the steam engine. 



If the name of any individual stands out as the great 

 and memorable one of that epoch of transition, at 

 which the static current of previous civilization changed 

 suddenly to a Niagara-current of progress, it will be the 



VOL. VII. 2 



