CHARLES B. WARRING, PH.D. 137 



action, and gifts hina with power under the guidance of 

 intellect to compel the blind, but stalwart forces of nature 

 to work for him. 



But for gravitation he would be helpless ; he could 

 not walk, he could scarc^-ly stand. The slightest push 

 would send him off into space. Thanks to that force, 

 he has a firm footing, and becomes a person of im- 

 portance. He causes huge buildings to rise by dividing 

 the weight to be lifted, and carries it up a little at a 

 time. Or, if the load be too massive, he applies the lever, 

 or the pulley, or the inclined plane, and by a small force 

 long applied, always in the last analysis getting back to 

 gravitation, he makes gravitation itself lift for him. If 

 he employs water or wind, it is to gravitation that he 

 owes his success. And if he uses steam or electricity, 

 they could do him no service, did not gravitation hold 

 the engine and the dynamo firmly to their bases. In 

 short, gravitation is not only itself made to work for man 

 but is his most valuable assistant in harnessing to his 

 use all other forces. 



Would he avail himself of the laws of chemistry, he 

 brings the substances he would affect into close prox- 

 imity, either in mass or dissolved in some liquid, or made 

 fluid by heat. To do this changes must be made in the 

 position of the substances to be operated on, of the fluid 

 in which to dissolve them, of the apparatus, of the fuel, 

 and so on through the list, and what changes could he 

 make unless aided by that beneficent, omnipresent force, 

 gravitation? 



It is thus that all the works of man have been produced. 

 Intellect utilizes and controls physical forces. Left to 

 themselves they work with tremendous energy, but it is 

 only to pull down ; they raise the mountains only to pull 

 them down lower than before, actually casting them into 

 the sea. The end to which they all tend is exhaustion, 

 silence, cold, and death. It is mind that erects houses, 



75 



