Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/249

Rh for good or evil in the economy of the world. These micro-organisms, the latest contribution to our knowledge of air, perform great analytical functions in organic nature, and are the means of converting much of its potential energy into actual energy. Through their action on dead matter the mutual dependence of plants and animals is secured, so that the air becomes at once the grave of organic death and the cradle of organic life. No doubt the ancients suspected this without being able to prove the dependence. Euripides seems to have seen it deductively when he describes the results of decay:

 "Then that which springs from earth, to earth returns, And that which draws its being from the sky Rises again up to the skyey height."

The consequences of the progressive discoveries have added largely to our knowledge of life, and have given a marvelous development to the industrial arts. Combustion and respiration govern a wide range of processes. The economical use of fuel, the growth of plants, the food of animals, the processes of husbandry, the maintenance of public health, the origin and cure of disease, the production of alcoholic drinks, the processes of making vinegar and saltpeter—all these and many other kinds of knowledge have been brought under the dominion of law. No doubt animals respired, fuel burned, plants grew, sugar fermented, before we knew how they depended upon air. But, as the knowledge was empirical, it could not be intelligently directed. Now all these processes are ranged in order under a wise economy of Nature, and can be directed to the utilities of life: for it is true, as Swedenborg says, that human "ends always ascend as Nature descends." There is scarcely a large industry in the world which has not received a mighty impulse by the better knowledge of air acquired within a hundred years. If I had time I could show still more strikingly the industrial advantages which have followed from Cavendish's discovery of the composition of water. I wish that I could have done this, because it was Addison who foolishly said, and Paley who as unwisely approved the remark, that "mankind required to know no more about water than the temperature at which it froze and boiled, and the mode of making steam."

When we examine the order of progress in the arts, even before they are illumined by science, their improvements seem to be the resultants of three conditions:

1. The substitution of natural forces for brute animal power, as when Hercules used the waters of the Alpheus to cleanse the Augean stables; or when a Kamchadal of Eastern Asia, who has been three years hollowing out a canoe, finds that he can do it in a few hours by fire.

2. The economy of time, as when a calendering machine produces the same gloss to miles of calico that an African savage gives to a