358 Dr. Whewell’s Inaugural Lecture 
science. In the. useful and ornamental arts nations. are always 
going forwards, from stage to stage. Different nations have 
ached different stages of this. progress, and all their different 
stages are seen at once, in the aspect which they have at this 
moment in the magical glass, which the enchanters of our time 
have made to rise out of the ground like an exhalation. The 
infancy of nations, their youth, their middle age, and their ma- 
turity, all appear in their simultaneous aspect, like the most dis- 
tant objects revealed at the same moment by a flash of lightning 
in a dusky night :—or we may compare the result to that which 
would be produced, if we could suppose some one of the skillful 
photographers whose subtle apparatus we have had exhibited 
there, could. bring within his field. of view the surface of the 
nation’s progress from another. rae 
_An ingenious speculator of our own day, clothing these meta- 
physical abstractions in the form which modern science assigns 
to them, has shown how we might, theoretically speaking, be, 
in a few instants, actual spectators, bodily and. contemporaneous 
eye-witnesses, of all the events which have passed since man 
as existed upon earth. For, if we only imagine that, as the 
visual impressious on the vehicle of light, by which alone vision 
can take place, travel away from the scenes by the occurrence of 
which their configuration was given to them, we also travel after 
ing vision, and : 
this movin; d go but a very little faster than light itself, 
ove sssively the visual images of all successive 
events, and see them as truly as a distant spectator (and what 
spectator 1s not more or less distant?) sees what passes before bis 
eyes. We might thus see now what is passing around us, a! 
mark, at each period, the food, the clothing, the arms, the tools, 
the houses, the machines, and the ornaments of the various eras: 
