Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/635

Rh joyful message. The ocean has been spanned with an electric nerve, and the New World responds to the greetings of the Old.

Here is something practical, which all can appreciate, and all are ready to honor. We honor the courage which conceived, the skill which executed, and, above all, the success which crowned the undertaking. But, do we not forget that professor of Bologna with his frogs' legs, who sowed the seed from which all this has sprung? He labored without hope of temporal reward, stimulated by the pure love of truth; and the grain which he planted has brought forth this abundant harvest. Do we not forget, also, that succession of equally noble men, Volta, and Oersted, and Faraday, with many other not less devoted investigators of electrical science, without whose unselfish labors the great result never could have been achieved? Such men, of course, need no recognition at our hands, and I ask the question not for their sakes, but for ours. The intellectual elevation of the lives they led was their all-sufficient reward.

It is, however, of the utmost importance for us, citizens of a country with almost unlimited resources, that we should recognize what are the real springs of true national greatness and enduring influence. In this age of material interests, the hand is too ready to say to the head, "I have no need of thee," and, amid the ephemeral applause which follows the realization of some triumph over matter, we are apt to be deceived, and not observe whence the power came. We associate the great invention with some man of affairs who overcame the last material obstacle, and who, although worthy of all praise, probably added very little to the total wealth of knowledge, of which the invention was an immediate consequence; and, not seeing the antecedents, we are apt to underrate the part which the student or scientific investigator may have contributed to the result.

It is idle, for example, to speak of the electric telegraph as invented by any single man. It was a growth of time; and many of the men who contributed to win this great victory of mind over space "builded far better than they knew." As I view the subject, that invention is as much a gift of Providence as if the details had been supernaturally revealed. But, whatever may be our speculative views, it is of the utmost importance to the welfare of our community that we should realize the fact that purely theoretical scientific study, pursued for truth's sake, is the essential prerequisite for such inventions. Knowledge is the condition of invention. The old Latin word invenio signifies to meet with, or to find, and these great gifts of God are met with along the pathway of civilization; but the throng of the world passes them unnoticed, for only those can recognize the treasure whose minds have been stored with the knowledge which the scholar has discovered and made known.

If, then, as no one will deny, science and scholarship are the powers by which improvements in the useful arts are made, I might appeal