100 ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. 



ed with exactness and truth in intelligible language. The same 

 subtle fluid, by the same agency, bids fair to be an useful auxili- 

 ary of the less mighty steam-engine — a mechanical power, and a 

 means of propulsion ; and will, perhaps, in a short time, be econ- 

 omized to dispel the darkness of night in our large cities. The 

 telephone enables individuals to converse, each one from his own 

 chamber, over widely intervening spaces ; and ere long sound 

 may rival electricity in instantaneous communication. Except 

 in imagination there is no power that thus mocks at distance. If 

 we would find something analagous we must invade the realms 

 of fiction. The authors of the Arabian Nights Entertainments 

 do no more, who sand princes and princesses through the air on 

 enchanted horses, by the twist of a peg, thousands of miles in a 

 moment — literally with the speed of thought; and our own im- 

 mortal Shakspeare, perhaps dreaming of an ocean cable, evokes 

 an adventurous sprite, able to "put a girdle round the earth in forty 

 minutes." These were the wildest vagaries of imagination, which 

 have become in the nineteenth century sober realities. 



The imaginative standard of the past having thus been reduced 

 to a fixed value, I may be permitted further to illustrate the 

 practical necromancy of modern times. 



Daguerre, in 1839, after years of experiment, at length by a 

 wonderful but simple process, transmitted the human portrait 

 from life to plates of silvered copper, made sensitive to solar light 

 by the vapour of iodine. Soon thereafter, the principle thus fully 

 developed, improvements sprang up on every hand, and the re- 

 sults so far are beautiful photographs, made permanent by auto- 

 type, which give the most accurate delineations of works of art 

 as well as natural objects. It is not to be supposed that they will 

 stop here, or that science has done with them. Genius will in time 

 be able to fix the colours of the camera, as well as its shadows. 



Again, experiments on light, following a growing knowledge 

 of the laws by which it is governed, have produced the spectro- 

 scope, and now scientists assume, from careful analysis of the 

 solar atmosphere, that they have a clue to ascertain the substance 

 of the sun. 



In connection with this subject, the experiment of Mr. Lock- 

 yer, a distinguished savant, an editor of Nature, a journal well 

 known in the world of science, with reference to the solar and 

 stellar spectra* arc of much interest. He has started an hypo- 

 thesis, and justified it by exporiinent — that the elements them- 

 Belves, or at all events some of them, are compound bodies, and 

 that hydrogen is the principal elementary substance represented 



