Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/685

Rh silk directly from the leaves, and perhaps even produce the substance which the worm elaborates, and spin it into silk!

Since the telephone has shown that man, through the agency of electricity, can talk with his fellow-man hundreds of miles away, there are men daring enough to think that through the same agency man may yet see things at an equally great distance, so that you may not only talk from Boston to your friend in New York, but may actually see him as if face to face, and they claim that their attempts have been attended with some degree of success. Would you dare to say it is more unlikely that such a result may be achieved than that man should be able to transmit intelligence instantly three thousand miles through the depths of the ocean? Through long ages man remained unconscious of the presence and action of the forces of magnetism and electricity, but we now know that they are constantly present everywhere, and incessantly active. What other forces may still be hidden from the observation of man it is impossible to know.

The present scientific belief is that the atmosphere is an aggregation of infinitely small molecules, which really till but a small part of the space the air seems to occupy; that through the unoccupied space these molecules are rushing at a high speed, hitting each other and the solid bodies around them and rebounding, and that what we call the pressure of the atmosphere, fifteen pounds to the inch, is really the bombardment of these molecules upon whatever arrests their course. The reason that all solid things are not swept away by this incessant pounding is, that the blows are struck in every direction, and so neutralize each other. But here is an ever-present and ever-active force, and, if man should ever discover a way to make all the particles of a body of air move in one direction, he would have at every place on the surface of the earth an unlimited amount of power placed at his command.

But even if man should accomplish all this, there would still be an infinite distance between anything which he could devise or construct and the organic structures which grow up around him; between the forces which he could wield and those exhibited in the operations of Nature; and each step which he might take, while it would enlarge his knowledge, would at the same time bring him into the presence of new mysteries, and open up to him new problems for solution. Each new invention gives birth to a host of other new ones.

The steam-engine has been the study of inventors for a hundred years, and each year has witnessed improvements upon it, and such improvements are going on more rapidly than ever before.

About forty years have elapsed since Howe gave the sewing-machine to the world, and thousands of inventions for its improvement or adaptation to new uses have been made, and they are going on still. The same is true of reaping-machines, spinning-machines, looms, the manufacture of iron and steel, printing and telegraphy, and of almost everything used by man.