Page:A Few Hours in a Far Off Age.djvu/38

Rh Electric motors are now being discussed. To my uneducated comprehension they appear wondrous specimens of mechanism and superior work, as do many other things here exhibited, the use of which I cannot define. They are entirely unknown to us. But the children—"Children"! I am the only child amongst these young people, though they have so few years compared with mine—they laugh good-naturedly at the efforts of "infant science." The younger one declares, with mirth in his musical voice, that if such "monstrosities" had continued in use up to his time, he "would have petitioned all scientists to combine their intellect for extension of the atmosphere, or for the invention of something by means of which we could journey safely outside it. Otherwise there would never have been room sufficient for all the air travellers of our era."

Then their mother tells them how, by the unswerving law of correlation, inventions began to lose their crude form and imperfections from the time men began to lose their brute vanity. "When they acknowledged, in the justice born of their improved minds, that women were also humans, and not of a lower species—made for man's comfort or amusement—as the strutting, ignorant creatures used to tell each other. They had kept women uncultured on every scientific or mechanical subject, while they gave themselves extraordinary and exclusive privileges for acquirement of all such learning. Then, with their usual faulty logic on most things relating to women, declared she had no mechanical ability or inventive talent, in proof of which assertion they audaciously asked what she had done to evince any! Yet, with all their advantages, very few, out of the countless millions born, rose above what was considered only mediocrity, even in their own egotistical age. Those lamentably