Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/114

110 or from Europe, while even as late as the civil war our news was two weeks old when it reached England. What a contrast to the present, when the news of the fall of a cabinet or the overthrow of a sultan last night in any part of the world is put before us at breakfast this morning, and that not only in the centers of population, but in remote country districts. Nations can not now ignore each other's feelings and desires, while those misapprehensions which lead to war are made many times less frequent. The use of the ocean cable and of the telephone has largely transformed methods of doing business. Time is money, and although the increased facility of locomotion has led hosts of business men to circulate from one end of the country to the other, this can now in large measure be saved by the use of the telephone.

More important for the existence of man even than transportation and communication is food. The applications of science have made not one, but thousands of blades of grass grow where one grew before. Chemistry has shown how to fertilize the exhausted soil, engineering has furnished water where none was, and caused the desert to blossom as the rose. Its latest feat, in the anxiety due to the exhaustion of the nitrate beds, has been the fixation of the nitrogen of the air, which in Norway combines the harnessing of the waters with the compulsion, in the electric arc, of the nitrogen to unite with the oxygen, thus yielding unlimited nitrates for the restoration of our exhausted food supplies. Here also transportation comes in, so that the famines which formerly vexed large portions of the earth have now lost their terrors. When we think of the misery of the English agricultural classes before the abolition of the corn laws we may well praise the development of transportation which has enabled her to eat out of our full hand. At the same time the application of thermodynamics to freezing machinery has enabled us to send our meat across the ocean to become the roast beef of old England. The effects of all this upon the farmer can not be passed by. Commanding the markets of the world, ploughing his fields by steam or electricity, grinding his grain by gasoline, feeding his stock from silos, milking his cows by vacuum, cooling his cream by cold-producing machinery, separating it in a centrifugal creamer, making his cheese by the aid of chemistry so that he duplicates the product of any locality in the world, in easy reach of the city by automobile or trolley-car, and in communication with all his neighbors by telephone, he is no longer an object of derision, a hayseed, but an example of the works of science, demanding an equal part of influence in the government of the country, and gladly contributing of his rich store to the endowment of institutions like this for the education of his youth and the further advancement of science.

Again let us consider what science has done for the amelioration of health. When we consider the crowding, the filth, the misery of the