Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/321

 condition of ordinary interchangeable energy. But how simple all those things now appear, after the ways of them are known! and how we wonder at the dulness of our ancestors of the nineteenth century, and even later on, in not discovering them sooner!

At length came the crowning discovery, by which our electro-light energy could impart locomotion to bodily substance, as it had previously been able to do only to the ether vibration. This discovery was reserved for my illustrious old friend Black, the renowned ex-chemical professor of our greatest university, who has thus given immortality to his name, and who still survives, in his honoured old age, to witness the marvellous results of his magnificent exploit. When, long ago, the duplication of the cross gave us the reversion-power that brought responsively back to us the missives or messages which we sent into far-off space, it was, even then, shrewdly surmised, that a further step in the cross-electric, completing, in fact, the full bi-cross, must superadd, inter alia, locomotive power over corporate substance. Indeed the more speculative minds, even at this early time, advanced still further, even to the idea of the ter-cross, with powers that seemed, for the l)resent at least, and while within only bi-cross purview, to be entirely superhuman. These earlier and sanguine predictors have long passed away, and the full bi-cross attainment has involved perhaps a longer interval than they had, over-sanguinely, anticipated. But when the great discovery we now have to deal