844 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE 



those which our present Poet-Laureate enumerates in epexegesis of 

 the * march of mind ;' there we have the line, 



* In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind,* 



— ponderables and imponderables severally holding their due 

 mutual proportion. And from this line I can pass in this place by 

 a natural and locally suggested transition to what I believe to be 

 as large a difference between the ancient and modern world as 

 either of the two last touched upon. The whole of the old world, 

 of the orhis veterihus notus, of Traaa rj olKov[ilvr], was but a small 

 fragment as measured by the geographer when compared with the 

 world dealt with by our emigration agents and Custom-house officers. 

 The discovery of America has been said to have exercised much the 

 sort of influence upon the old world, socially and politically, that 

 the approximation to our globe of some new planet would exercise 

 astronomically; and since those 'spacious times of great Elizabeth' 

 China, Japan, Australia, and Polynesia have each entered into the 

 circle of influences acting upon and acted on by the world as 

 known to the classical writers. In speaking of any district beyond 

 those in relation with the valleys of the Euphrates, the Danube, 

 the Rhine, the Rhone, and the shores of the Mediterranean 

 and Black Sea, the ancients would but say in really pathetic 

 antithesis : 



* Longa procul longis via dividit invia terris.* 



The Brindisi mail brings every manager of a museum, as well as 

 every secretary for the colonies, into weekly relation with ' regions 

 Caesar never knew,' by agencies of which he never dreamt and of 

 which in our own times the greatest perhaps of his successors, 

 fortunately for us, as he is reported to have remarked in Plymouth 

 Sound, never learnt to avail himself. And it is in reference to the 

 all-pervading intercommunication which the application of steam 

 to navigation has rendered possible that I wish to utter two con- 

 cluding sentences, not respecting the vast contrast which it has set 

 up between the present and all preceding centuries, but respecting 

 the contrast which it will shortly have created between the present 

 and all future times. Before this application had established high- 

 ways on the ocean and invented machinery which, 



'Spurning sails and scorning oars, 

 Keeps faith with time on distant shores,* 



