Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/126

 my history; the third and last, that greatest of all past discoveries, that of the Reduplicatory power, belongs to the current age, and is still in the recollection of not a few now alive, who can thus look to times almost, one could say, of comparative ignorance which preceded it. Some sanguine minds already indulge the hope of science's advance into the powers of the CrossTriplication, or the Ter-Cross, as it is alternatively and abbreviatively called; and there are some few who talk wildly of even the Quarto-Cross, and such powers and such range of mental view as pertain, in the opinion of more sober spirits, only to the superhuman.

But however it may be with that outer ledge of the progress question, the discovery of the cross-electric, simple and small as, in a comparative sense, that old discovery may now appear to us, inaugurated a progress far outstripping anything previously in human experience. This great event of its time opened to man a new range of power over the material universe. We have had occasion already to notice the great advance it gave to organic chemistry, in helping us to produce our food directly in the laboratory, instead of by the old protracted circuitous process of natural vital growth, with all its monopolizing requirement of surface-room on the earth, which could no longer be spared to it. This cross-electric discovery led us promptly to that of the Electro-Light speed, a speed exceeding that of the heretofore amazing speed of simple light, in the proportion in which the distance between the crests of the waves or vibrations of light exceeds that between the atomic points of the component ether. Light-speed and Electro-light speed