242 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XVI. No. 404 



onstration really comes, we are hardly prepared for the vast 

 change in our ideas it occasions. We have been used, for 

 the most part, to study electricity in conductors; but it now 

 appears that this is but a special case, that we really must 

 study electricity in the space ai'ound the conductors. Some 

 go so far as to say that in the not distant future we shall 

 have no more use for the words " heat " and " light," but our 

 text-books on physics will treat in their place solely of elec- 

 tricity. 



There is one other field of pure science to which I would 

 like to refer this evening, — that of astronomy. When the 

 Dutch scholar held two lenses together and saw distant ob- 

 jects brought near, he little thought of the revelations which 

 would be made by the telescope of the future; he little 

 thought of seeing the moon as if it were but ten short miles 

 away, of viewing millions of stars where the eye sees none 

 to shine; he little thought of seeing two miniature worlds 

 revolving around the planet Mars, — worlds so small that we 

 could pack several of them away in one of our Kentucky 

 counties. It is, however, when we lend to our telescopes the 

 aid of photography and the spectroscope that our knowledge 

 of the universe outside of us becomes so almost infinitely en- 

 larged. 



From the spectroscope we have learned that ihe sun is 

 composed of the same elements we know on our earth, that 

 even the most distant star is but a sun like that of our solar 

 system, that the comet is perhaps but a stream of meteors 

 like those wliich our earth is continually meeting in its 

 journey through space, that the material of all the universe 

 is one. We learn more : for we see the genesis of worlds : 

 nebulae condensing to suns, and suns cooling to a state like 

 our own luminary; and yet, further, we are, as it were, in 

 the very presence of the creation and of the death of stars, — 

 stages our system has millions of years since passed 

 through, and those through which it will pass centuries 

 after we are gone. 



So, too, when we find upon the photographic plate the 

 print of stars so far away that we cannot see them even in 

 our most powerful telescopes, — stars from which the light- 

 vibrations which have left their impress on the plate may 

 have started long before the first man appeared on this 

 earth, — we feel ourselves almost in the presence of infinity 

 itself. Is there no end to the universe, no point beyond 

 which there do not stretch worlds on worlds ? Will the sci- 

 ence of the future answer this ? Who can tell ? 



Turning now from the, to my audience, perhaps less 

 familiar field of pure science, to that which cannot fail to 

 force itsalf upon the attention of every one, the applications 

 of science, we find that probably the most important single 

 discovery is that of the steam-engine. Who could have 

 dreamed, when that little boy sat watching the cloud of steam 

 from his mother's tea-kettle, of the millions of applications 

 the world was to see in the next century ? Who could have 

 imagined, when he allowed bis imagination its wildest flights, 

 that through this power civilization itself would have been 

 revolutionized ? 



Ages ago the energy of the sun was stored up in the 

 vast coal-beds of every quarter of the globe. Until the dis- 

 covery of the steam-engine, man had left all this source 

 of energy untouched. To-day he is just beginning to 

 realize the immense capacity for work presented to him; and 



yet how wasteful he is ! It is for the scientist of the future 

 to present a way that this energy can be fully utilized, since 

 to-day, without thought for his descendants, man is scatter- 

 ing by far the greater portion of this energy to the air. A 

 steam-engine which will return more than a few per cent of 

 the possible energy of the coal is yet to be devised. Never- 

 theless, imperfect as the best steam-engine is, think of the 

 improvement on the time of our grandparents ! The annihila- 

 tion of time and space has begun. We rush along the iron 

 rail at a mile a minute quite as a matter of cotirse, and a 

 Boynton has promised us a trip frotn New York to San Fran- 

 cisco in a day; a week or less carries us across the Atlantic, 

 and a George Francis Train needs but the time of a school- 

 teacher's vacation to girdle the globe. Our latest journal 

 brings us news that Jules Verne's " Twenty Thousand 

 Leagues under the Sea " is no longer a fancy, but that the 

 successful submarine boat has become a fact. Still More's 

 Utopia has not yet been fully reached. The air remains as 

 an unconquered field ; but who can doubt that the time will 

 come, and that perhaps in the not far distant future, when 

 man will vie with the eagle in his flight, and thus friction, 

 the great impediment to rapid transit, will be reduced to a 

 minimum? "The birds can fly, and why can't I ?" is not 

 merely the foolish quandary of Darius Green : it is the sober 

 inquiry of many engineers. 



The advance in the field of applied chemistry is not behind 

 that of engineering. Most striking is the cheap production 

 of steel. From the days of the Kabyles, little advance had 

 been made down to a comparatively recent date; but the in- 

 vention of what is commonly known as Bessemer steel, — an 

 invention, by the way, of one of our own citizens, — has 

 opened the way to the replacing of iron by steel for a multi- 

 tude of purposes, and presages the day when steel will almost 

 completely take the place of iron. And yet prophets tell us 

 that not steel, but aluminum, is the metal of the future. 

 The price of this metal is continually being lowered, never 

 more than within the past year or two; and it is certainly 

 capable of many applications. It may be that even steel will 

 not be able to hold its own, though I confess such is hardly 

 my judgment. 



In the field of applied chemistry is one of the best illustra- 

 tions of the fact that if man can clearly state a problem, he 

 can solve it. Napoleon offered a large reward if any one 

 would devise a simple method of manufacturing soda from 

 salt; and among the processes presented was one which is 

 to-day still in use, practically unchanged in principle from 

 Le Blanc's speciflcations. 



With the developments of the soda industry has gone hand 

 in hand that of soap-making. It is hard for us to believe 

 that there could have existed a civilized people who did not 

 use soap; but we are told the Greeks had no soap, and 

 that the Eomans used it only as a cosmetic. Still it is none 

 the less true that, as has been said by another, it is possible to 

 judge the standard of civilization of a nation by the amount 

 of soap which it uses. Perhaps the two other most strik- 

 ing and most promising developments of applied chemistry 

 are those of the synthetical formation of dye-stuffs and 

 drugs. 



Many of you doubtless remember the furor occasioned 

 when the first aniline dyes were thrown on the market, and 

 the fortunes rhade and lost. Yet who could have foreseen the 



