26 IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 



and left on record to await their use by invention at the 

 proper time. 



The mobility in the social organism so largely due to 

 science has had far-reaching effects. It stimulates pro- 

 duction to the utmost. It opens the markets of the world 

 to the products of every worker. Labor has itself become 

 mobile, and in the factory raw material from distant lands 

 meet operatives from across the seas. It is the cause of 

 vast immigrations such as that which has brought to the 

 United States more than nineteen and a quarter million 

 people since the opening of steamship routes across the 

 Atlantic. It makes impossible in civilized lands such 

 famines as that which in 1878 in two of the northern prov- 

 vinces of China destroyed more than nine million men.. 

 It opens to the occupation of a single homogeneous civil- 

 ized commonwealth such vast areas as the Mississippi 

 Valley. To any such it would be as fatal to stop the social 

 circulation made possible by science, as in a limb of the body 

 to ligate the main arter}^ Dense population can indeed 

 exist wherever food can be raised in abundance, as on the 

 river plains of China, but without the modes of distribu- 

 tion introduced by the science of the nineteenth century,, 

 they can neither be unified into a homogeneous com- 

 munity nor can they be lifted to the levels of modern 

 civilization. 



By its systems of circulation which break down all bar- 

 riers, science has brought about the supreme crisis in 

 social and political evolution. Like the epeirogenic move- 

 ments which mark the crises in geologic history, which 

 united continents and precipitated alien upon indigenous 

 fauna, so science has brought civilization and barbarism 

 the world over in all their stages to meet in a life and 

 death struggle, and offers to the fittest the prize of a world 

 encircling empire. 



The fact that in order to operate the railway it is neces- 

 sary to send signals at greater speeds than those of moving 

 trains, suggests another service of science, — the highest 

 material, service which it renders the commonweal. In. 

 the telegraph and telephone a system is supplied for the 



