444 
NATORE 
[ Sept. 10, 1885 
force. In industrial progress the sweat of the brow is lessened 
by the conceptions of the brain. How exultant is the old Greek 
poet, Antipater,’ when women are relieved of the drudgery of 
turning the grindstones for the daily supply of corn. ‘* Woman ! 
you who have hitherto had to grind corn, let your arms rest for 
the future. It is no longer for you that the birds announce by 
their songs the dawn of the morning. Ceres has ordered the 
water-nymphs to move the heavy millstones and perform your 
labour.” Penelope had twelve slaves to grind corn for her small 
household. During the most prosperous time of Athens it was 
estimated that there were twenty slaves to each free citizen. 
Slaves are mere machines, and machines neither invent nor 
discover. The bondmen of the Jews, the helots of Sparta, the 
captive slaves of Rome, the serfs of Europe, and uneducated 
labourers of the present day who are the slaves of ignorance, 
have added nothing to human progress. But as natural forces 
substitute and become cheaper than slave labour, liberty follows 
advancing civilisation. Machines require educated superin- 
tendence. One shoe factory in Boston by its machine does the 
work of thirty thousand shoemakers in Paris who have still to 
go through the weary drudgery of mechanical labour. The 
steam power of the world, during the last twenty years, has 
risen from 114 million to 29 million horse-power, or 152 per 
cent. 
Let me take a single example of how even a petty manu- 
facture improved by the teachings of science affects the comforts 
and enlarges the resources of mankind. When I was a boy the 
only way of obtaining a light was by-the tinder-box, with its 
quadruple materials, flint and steel, burnt rags or tinder, and a 
sulphur match. If everything went well, if the box could be 
found and the air was dry, a light could be obtained in two 
minutes ; but very often the time occupied was much longer, 
and the process became a great trial to the serenity of temper. 
The consequence of this was that a fire or a burning lamp was 
kept alight through the day. Old Gerard, in his herbal, tells us 
how certain fungi were used to carry fire from one part of the 
country to the other. The tinder-box long held its position as 
a great discovery in the arts. The Pyxidicula tyniaria of the 
Romans appears to have been much the same implement, 
though a little ruder, than the flint and steel which Philip the 
Good put into the collar of the Golden Fleece in 1429 as a repre- 
sentation of high knowledge in the progress of the arts. It con- 
tinued to prevail till 1833, when phosphorus matches were 
introduced, though I have been amused to find that there are a 
few venerable ancients in London who still stick to the tinder 
box and for whom a few shops keep a small supply. Phosphorus 
was no new discovery, for it had been obtained by an Arabian 
called Bechel in the eighth century. However it was forgotten, 
and was rediscovered by Brandt, who made it out of very 
stinking materials in 1669. Other discoveries had, however, to 
be made before it could be used for lucifer matches. The science 
of combustion was only developed on the discovery of oxygen a 
century later. Time had to elapse before chemical analysis 
showed the kind of bodies which could be added to phosphorus 
so as to make it ignite readily. So it was not till 1833 that 
matches became a partial success. Intolerably bad they then 
were, dangerously inflammable, horribly poisonous to the 
makers, and injurious to the lungs of the consumers. It required 
another discovery, by Schrotter in 1845, to change poisonous 
waxy into innocuous red-brick phosphorus in order that these 
defects might be remedied, and to give us the safety-match of 
the present day. Now what have these successive discoveries in 
science done for the nation, in this single manufacture, by an 
economy of time? If before 1833 we had made the same 
demands for light that we now do, when we daily consume 
eight matches per head of the population, the tinder-box could 
have supplied the demand under the most favourable conditions 
by an expenditure of one quarter of an hour. The lucifer-match 
supplies a light in fifteen seconds on each occasion, or in two 
minutes for the whole day. Putting these differences into a year 
the venerable ancient who still sticks to his tinder-box would 
require to spend ninety hours yearly in the production of light, 
while the user of lucifer-matches spends twelve hours; so that 
the latter has an economy of seventy-eight hours yearly, or 
about ten working days. Measured by cost of production at one 
shilling and sixpence daily, the economy of time represented in 
money to our population is twenty-six millions of pounds 
annually. This is a curious instance of the manner in which 
science leads to economy of time and wealth even in a small | 
* **Analecta Veterum Gracorum,” Epig. 39, vol. ii. p. 119. 
manufacture. In larger industries the economy of time and labour 
produced by the application of scientific discoveries is beyond 
all measurement. Thus the discovery of latent heat by Black 
led to the inventions of Watt ; while that of the mechanical 
equivalent of heat by Joule has been the basis of the progressive 
improvements in the steam-engine which enables power to be 
obtained by a consumption of fuel less than one-fourth the 
amount used twenty years ago. It may be that the engines of 
Watt and Stephenson will yield in their turn to more economical 
motors ; still they have already expanded the wealth, resources, 
and even the territories of England more than all the battles 
fought by her soldiers or all the treaties negotiated by her 
diplomatists. 
The coal which has hitherto been the chief source of power 
probably represents the product of five or six million years 
during which the sun shone upon the plants of the Carboniferous 
period, and stored up its energy in this convenient form. But 
we are using this conserved force wastefully and prodigally ; for 
although horse power in steam-engines has so largely increased 
since 1864, two men only now produce what three men did at 
that date. It is only three hundred years since we became a 
manufacturing country. According to Prof. Dewar, in less than 
two hundred years more the coal of this country will be wholly 
exhausted, and in half that time will be difficult to procure. 
Our not very distant descendants will have to face the problem 
—What will be the condition of England without coal? The 
answer to that question depends upon the intellectual develop- 
ment of the nation at that time. The value of the intellectual 
factor of production is continually increasing; while the values 
of raw material and fuel are lessening factors. It may be that 
when the dreaded time of exhausted fuel has arrived, its impor- 
tation from other coal-fields, such as those of New South Wales, 
will be so easy and cheap, that the increased technical education 
of our operatives may largely over-balance the disadvantages of 
increased cost in fuel. But this supposes that future Govern- 
ments in England will have more enlightened views as to the 
value of science than past Governments have possessed. 
Industrial applications are but the overflowings of science welling 
over from the fulness of its measure. Few would ask now, as 
was constantly done a few years ago, ‘*‘ What is the use of an 
abstract discovery in science?” Faraday once answered this 
question by another, ‘‘ What is the use of a baby?” Yet 
around that baby centre all the hopes and sentiments of his 
parents, and even the interests of the State, which interferes in 
its upbringing so as to ensure it being a capable citizen. The 
processes of mind which produce a discovery or an invention are 
rarely associated in the same person, for while the discoverer 
seeks to explain causes and the relations of phenomena, the 
inventor aims at producing new effects, or at least of obtaining 
them in a novel and efficient way. In this the inventor may 
sometimes succeed without much knowledge of science, though 
his labours are infinitely more productive when he understands 
the causes of the effects which he desires to produce. 
A nation in its industrial progress, when the competition of the 
world is keen, cannot stand still. Three conditions only are 
possible for it. It may go forward, retrograde, or perish. Its 
extinction as a great nation follows its neglect of higher educa- 
tion, for, as described in the proverb of Solomon, ‘‘ They that 
hate instruction love death.” In sociology, as in biology, there 
are three states. The first of balance, when things grow neither 
better nor worse ; the second that of elaboration or evolution, as 
we see it when animals adapt themselves to their environments ; 
and third, that of degeneration, when they rapidly lose the 
ground they have made. For a nation, a state of balance is 
only possible in the early stage of its existence, but it is im- 
possible when its environments are constantly changing. 
The possession of the raw materials of industry and the exist- 
ence of a surplus population are important factors for the growth 
of manufactures in the early history of a nation, but afterwards 
they are bound up with another factor—the application of 
intellect to their development. England could not be called a 
manufacturing nation till the Elizabethan age. No doubt coal, 
iron, and wood were in abundance, though, in the reign of the 
Plantagenets, they produced little prosperity. Wool was sent 
to Flanders to be manufactured, for England then stood to 
Holland as Australia now does to Yorkshire. The political 
crimes of Spain, from the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella to 
that of Philip III., destroyed it as a great manufacturing nation, 
and indirectly led to England taking its position. Spain, 
| through the activity and science of the Arabian intellect, had 
