Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/489

Rh of Mohammed and the rise of his religion, of the consequences which followed the establishment of great empires like that of Charlemagne, or of the results of geographical discovery, as in the discovery of America or of the passage to India.

I am well aware of the difficulty of comparing the magnitude or importance of such things, for instance, as the art of printing, the steam-engine, or the railway or telegraph, with a new form of religion, or the establishment or overthrow of an empire, or the introduction of new forms of government. One man may attach much higher importance to some of these things than another would do, and a very much higher importance to them at one period of his life than at another.

It may seem absurd to some persons to make any comparison, for instance, between the benefits flowing from the introduction of Sabbath schools and those which have followed the invention of friction-matches; between the results due to the invention of spectacles and the consequences which followed the Reformation, And yet it is easy to see that each of these things must have had an important influence upon the physical, social, and moral condition of men, upon their habits of thought and of living, and upon their comfort and happiness. There is, therefore, some just relation between the value of these things to men, and it will not be unprofitable to spend a little time in considering how much we owe to inventors for what we have and what we are.

It is my purpose this evening to briefly bring into view, if I can, the service which inventors have rendered the world, and the part which inventions play in the moral and social condition of man. I shall point out in some cases the extreme simplicity of the inventions, in others the wonderful results which have flowed from them.

I shall refer not merely to what are called great inventions, but to some which seem to be very small. I shall very likely speak of nothing with which you are not all more or less familiar, but I may possibly suggest reflections which are interesting but which seldom come to our minds, for the very reason that we are so familiar with the things to which they relate; and I think that I may be able to show that there arc no other men to whom the world is so much indebted as to its inventors, no others who so well merit its honors and deserve its gratitude.

We do not often stop to think how little man has or enjoys that is not the fruit of invention. Things which man has long had we have ceased to think of as inventions, and we are apt to apply that terra only to modern things—to things the origin of which we know. Yet it will 1)0 hard for any of us to name anything which we use or enjoy which is not an invention, or the subject of an invention, in its adaptation to our use.

The air we breathe and the water we drink are provided by Nature. But we drink but very little water except from a cup or vessel of some kind, which is a human invention. Even if we drink from