Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/282

 that of the reduplication. The first came to our help not a very great while after our retrospect opens; the second occurred towards the midway years; while the last, and, for our time, the crowning triumph of all, came off within our own century, and even within the term and recollection of many now living. This last was, in short, the unprecedentedly grand discovery of my most illustrious and venerable friend Black, a discovery which has enabled us to transmit not only our minds in our messages, but also our own material selves into far space, in order to meet and commune personally with other beings out there, and to enjoy the reciprocation of their like personal intercourse.

To go back to describe with any fulness the cross-electric principle, a subject so long ago familiar even to our school-boys, would be unpardonable waste of time at this advanced and busy day. I shall, therefore, merely observe, that its discovery gave us a power to handle the organic as we could previously do the more simply chemical. Thenceforward we entered, with renewed and marvellously increased facilities, upon organic production. When the crowded earth had no longer room for provision-growing in the ordinary and dilatory round-about of old nature, we were ready, by aid of the cross-electric apparatus with which science had armed us, to transfer the food-raising to the much narrower space-requirements as well as time-requirements of the chemical laboratory.