Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/344

338 He had but just returned from Egypt, whither he had gone in connection with the project for raising the height of the Assouan dam, so as to increase its storage to more than double the present volume, when he died very suddenly on May 19, in his sixty-seventh year.

We live in an age when the development of the material resources of civilization is progressing in a ratio without parallel. International commerce spreads apace. Ocean transport is demanding greater facilities. Steamships of vaster size and swifter speed than any heretofore in use are being built every year. Not only are railways extending in all outlying parts of the world, but at home, where the territory is already everywhere intersected with lines, larger and heavier locomotives are being used, and longer runs without stopping are being made by our express trains. The horsed cars on our tramways are now being mostly superseded by larger cars, electrically propelled and traveling with greatly increased speeds. For the handling of the ever-increasing passenger traffic in our great cities electric propulsion has shown itself a necessity of the time; witness the electric railways in Liverpool and the network of electrically worked tube railways throughout London. In ten years the manufacture of automobile carriages of all sorts has sprung up into a great industry. Every year sees a greater demand for the raw materials and products, out of which the manufacturer will in turn produce the articles demanded by our complex modern life. We live and work in larger buildings; we make more use of mechanical appliances; we travel more, and our traveling is more expeditious than formerly; and not we alone but all the progressive nations. The world uses more steel, more copper, more aluminium, more paper; therefore requires more coal, more petroleum, more timber, more ores, more machinery for the getting and working of them, more trains and steamships for their transport. It requires machines that will work faster or more cheaply than the old ones to meet the increasing demands of manufacture; new fabrics; new dyes; even new foods; new and more powerful means of illumination; new methods of speaking to the ends of the earth.

We must not delude ourselves with imagining that the happiness and welfare of mankind depend only on its material advancement; or that moral, intellectual and spiritual forces are not in the ultimate resort of greater moment. But if the inquiry be propounded what it is that has made possible this amazing material progress, there is but one answer that can be given—science. Chemistry, physics, mechanics, mathematics, it is these that have given to man the possibility of organizing this tremendous development. And the great profession