Page:The Invisible World About Us - Rogers.pdf/3

 It is the penalty of progress. It is the blind retaliation of the thoughtless, getting even with those who give them the pain of a new idea. Jesus was killed. Socrates was poisoned. Galileo was persecuted. Copernicus was threatened. Columbus was imprisoned. Bruno was burned. Watt and Fulton were ridiculed and jeered. They were all unselfishly working for the enlightenment of mankind. They had ideas that were of incalculable value to the very people who derided them. They were the sanest of the sane. Yet they were regarded as dangerous men. They were denounced as fools and frauds and fanatics, and the hand of malice was not stayed until most of them were deprived of liberty or life. Original thinkers have usually been the victims of their beneficiaries. Every hand was against them, and every dungeon yawned for them. But in our day the infliction pf physical pain has gone out of fashion. We are now satisfied with ridicule. "Crank" and "fanatic" are epithets that some people apply to a man who points out new facts thanthat [sic] can not be explained by old theories, and produces new arguments that can not be conveniently answered. But thoughtful people no longer even ridicule new and strange ideas. With such wonders as radium and liquid air before us we begin to comprehend the fact that the invisible world about us is a vast field of unknown possibilities.

The first thing to be said about this invisible world is that everybody is acquainted with some of its manifestations. The street-cars we ride upon, and the telegrams we send, are visible evidence of the invisible thing we call electricity,—a force as mysterious and incomprehensible to the scientist as to the schoolboy. The very winds that blow are a part of the invisible,—moving masses of an invisible matter that science is now able to condense into visible, 2