Decembeb 11, 1908] 



SCIENCE 



829 



guns thcB and attack will be dangerous 

 work. 



The debt we owe the inventor is the dif- 

 ference between all that is ours to enjoy 

 in modern civilized life and the indigence 

 of barbarism. But for the inventor, we 

 should still be denizens of the unbroken 

 forest, clothed in the skins of beasts. Like 

 Antony, the inventor has with his "broad 

 sword quartered the world, and on green 

 Neptune's back with ships made cities." 

 He has hewn highways through the granite 

 hills and web-worked the world with the 

 iron rail. 



With his instruments of science the in- 

 ventor has sounded the deeps of the eternal 

 skies. He has discovered whence Orion 

 came, has felt the pulse of Areturus, and 

 he knows the fortune and the fate of a 

 million worlds. He has seen them quar- 

 ried out of chaos far beyond the troubling 

 touch of time; and he views their onward 

 drift toward death in the infinite night and 

 cold of immensity. 



He foresees our own bright sun a paling 

 ember on the hearth of time, and he reads 

 our destiny in the scroll of the milky way 

 by light that left its source so long ago 

 that it was already old upon its flight ere 

 Babylon was builded and when the 

 Egyptian pyramids were still unquarried. 



In aerial navigation the inventor is 

 obliged to hang his life on the hazard of 

 his mastery of unaccustomed principles, 

 where there are innumerable untried 

 variables— a stunt of the imagination like 

 taking a flight through the fourth dimen- 

 sion. 



Aerial naval tactics will include the use 

 of the thunder head to mask manoeuvres. 

 When the cloud-hung navies war and ride 

 the storm to battle, then conjecture will 

 attend the faU of slaughtered combatants 

 and wreckage from the sky to know if it 

 be Jove or man that thunders there. 



The more highly scientific war enginery 

 becomes the more the game of war will be 

 one that can be played only by the most 

 scientific and enlightened nations. 



We, the people of the United States, are 

 to-day dominated by a boundless egoistic 

 obsession concerning our importance and 

 our power compared with the importance 

 and the power of other nations and of 

 other races. This is an outgrowth of our 

 unprecedented prosperity. 



Our hitherto isolated geographical posi- 

 tion has relieved us of the burden of arma- 

 ments that other nations have had to bear ; 

 but conditions have now changed and the 

 changes are taking place faster than we 

 are waking up to them. 



The great increase in the speed of battle- 

 ships and cruisers, together with their 

 enormously greater size and carrying 

 capacity, has brought the other great war 

 powers nearer home to us and their fleets 

 are now practically at our doors and their 

 vast armies of veterans are almost within 

 gunshot of us. 



We have no real army, and though we 

 have a somewhat powerful fleet, England 

 has one far more powerful, and in propor- 

 tion to our needs for a fleet, ours is the 

 least adequate of that of any country of 

 consequence in the world. 



Mr. Reuterdahl told us some ugly things 

 about our navy recently and we were 

 mighty glad when we learned that there 

 was not a word of truth in what he said, 

 and we were made glad again when we 

 learned that the errors of construction 

 which he pointed out would not occur 

 again. 



Last winter. President Roosevelt asked 

 for four new battleships and Congress was 

 straightway petitioned by hundreds of 

 prominent turn-the-other-eheekers not to 

 build any battleships. "Shoo, fly, don't 

 bother us. Let us sleep." 



