APRIL 26, 1901.] 
What has been said already of the debt 
of industry to science in the development 
of its motive powers applies here equally in 
transportation. Permit a single illustration 
further of the value of pure science in the 
evolution of the circulatory system. Every 
engineer is aware of the large contribution 
which the steel rail has made to the success 
of the railway. Durable, strong and cheap, 
it has displaced on all our railways the 
weak and short-lived rail of iron. It has 
made possible heavier trains and higher 
speeds. Together with other factors it has 
so cheapened traction that, according to 
Professor J. J. Stevenson, the coal of West 
Virginia is now sold at New York City for 
less than one-fourth the railway freight 
charges of a quarter of a century ago. But 
itis no belittleoment of the laurels of Sir 
Henry Bessemer, the inventor who has 
made all this possible, to point to the fact 
that the success of his process, which, by 
ushering out the Age of Iron, and ushering 
in the Age of Steel, has revolutionized in- 
dustry and touched every home with its 
beneficence, is due not only to his use of 
a great body of facts in the chemistry of 
the metals, but in especial to the utiliza- 
tion by Mushet of the facts regarding the 
influence of manganese and its relation to 
carbon, facts ascertained in the laboratories 
of science 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 production to the ut- 
most. 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 meets operatives 
from across the seas. It is the cause of 
vast migrations, 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 
SCIENCE. 
649 
lands such famines as that which in 1878 
in two of thé northern provinces of China 
destroyed more than nine millions of men. 
It opens to the occupation of a single homo- 
geneous civilized commonwealth such vast 
areas as the Mississippi valley. To any such 
it would be as fatal to stop the social cir- 
culation made possible by science, asin a 
limb of the body to ligate the main artery. 
Dense populations can indeed exist wher- 
ever food can be raised in abundance, as on 
the river plains of China, but without the 
modes of distribution introduced by the sci- 
ence of the nineteenth century, they neither 
can be unified into a homogeneous commun- 
ity nor can they be lifted to the levels of 
modern civilization. 
By its systems of circulation which break 
down all barriers, 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 pre- 
cipitated alien upon indigenous fauna, sci- 
ence 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 rail- 
way it is necessary to send signals at greater 
speeds than those of moving trains, suggests 
another service of science—the highest ma- 
terial service which it renders the common 
weal. In the telegraph and telephone a 
system is supplied for the almost instanta- 
neous transmission of motor and sensory 
impulses throughout the body politic. In 
general terms we may compare the growth 
of the communicating system of society to 
the development of the nervous system in 
the history of animal life, where the scat- 
tered central cells of nature’s first sketch 
of such a system are later gathered into 
ganglia, and ganglia massed into a brain 
connected with every part of the body by 
ramifying nerve filaments. Of all social 
