26 
IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 
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 pro- 
duction to the utmost. 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 
meet operatives from across the seas. It is the cause of 
vast immigrations 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 lands such 
famines as that which in 1878 in two of the northern prov- 
vinces of China destroyed more than nine million men. 
It opens to the occupation of a single homogeneous civil- 
ized commonwealth such vast areas as the Mississippi 
Valley. To any such it would be as fatal to stop the social 
circulation made possible by science, as in a limb of the body 
to ligate the main artery. Dense population can indeed 
exist wherever food can be raised in abundance, as on the 
river plains of China, but without the modes of distribu- 
tion introduced by the science of the nineteenth century,, 
they can neither be unified into a homogeneous com- 
munity nor can they be lifted to the levels of modern 
civilization. 
By its systems of circulation which break down all bar- 
riers, 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 precipitated alien upon indigenous 
fauna, so science 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 railway it is neces- 
sary to send signals at greater speeds than those of moving 
trains, suggests another service of science, — the highest 
material service which it renders the commonweal. In 
the telegraph and telephone a system is supplied for tha 
