650 
organs this seems the most retarded in its 
evolution. In primitive society it is only 
the smallest groups, such as the family and 
the village community, which have a facil- 
ity of communication comparable with that 
of the lowest of the metazoa. In the larger 
groups of the tribe and nation we find a 
stage more advanced than that of the hydra 
only after science has made possible the 
railway post and the telegraph and tele- 
phone. 
That Morse is the inventor of the electric 
telegraph is a statement more veracious 
than that of the Vermont farmer who said 
that everybody knew that Edison invented 
electricity. But the name of the inventor 
of every tool of society is legion. Morse set 
the keystone of the arch, but its voussoirs 
had been built by investigators unknown 
to popular fame in many lands, and even 
the keystone was almost placed in the hands 
of the distinguished inventor by Henry, the 
great physicist. And Oersted, who in 1819 
deflected the magnetic compass by a voltaic 
current in a neighboring wire; Arago, 
whose experiments with iron filings proved 
that this current would generate magnet- 
ism; Ampére with his suggestion of the 
possibility of signaling at a distance by the 
deflection of needles ; Sweiger, who took up 
Oersted’s experiment, and discovered that 
the deflecting force of the current was in- 
creased when the wire was coiled about the 
magnet; Sturgeon, who, making use of 
Arago’s discovery, replaced Sweiger’s mag- 
netic needle with soft iron and thus con- 
structed the first temporary or soft magnet ; 
Henry, who strengthened the electro-mag- 
net and used it with over a mile of wire to 
give signals by tapping a bell—all of these 
men, devoted solely to knowledge for 
knowledge’s sake, are sharers with Morse 
and Vail in the glory of the invention of 
the telegraph. 
And so with wireless telegraphy. In 
Marconi’s hand this invention blazes with 
SCIENCE. 
[N. 8. Von. XIII. No. 330. 
a sudden brilliance which attracts the at- 
tention of the world, but the torch has been. 
conveyed to him along the line of many 
runners in the torch race of scientific dis- 
covery. From Clerk Maxwell, who showed 
the analogy between electricity and light; 
from Hertz, with his demonstration of 
electromagnetic waves; from Onesti of 
Fermo, and Branly of Paris, and Lodge 
of London, whose researches produced in 
the coherer an instrument capable of seeing 
such waves ; from these and others the torch 
was passed on to the great inventor whose 
improvements in apparatus made effective 
the discoveries of science. 
In the telephone at least four scientific 
principles are involved—the voltaic cur- 
rent, the interaction of magnetism and elec- 
tricity, the temporary magnet and the mi- 
crophonic action of carbon. Through this 
marvelous invention each master in elec- 
trical science from the time of Galvani who 
has aided in the elucidation of these prin- 
ciples, though dead, yet speaketh. 
Thus we may fairly claim that to science 
is due in large measure the plexus of post, 
telegraph and telephone, by which intel- 
ligenceis flashed throughout the body social 
even more swiftly than along the nerves of 
the body physiologic. And how incalulable 
is the service which science thus renders ! 
Consider the extent of the channels of com- 
munication. The domestic mail service of 
the United States requires each year twenty- 
one million miles of travel. Sixty-four 
years ago the first commercial telegraph 
was built with a length of forty miles. At 
the close of the century there are not less 
than one million miles of telegraph in the 
United States, over which duplex and mul- 
tiplex messages are carried at the same 
time, and the rate of transmission has 
risen to six thousand signals per minute. 
One hundred and seventy thousand miles 
of submarine cables moor coasts, islands 
and continents together. Over one million 
