“ Edison and Thompson and Brush are honorable household names; yet they are still living to produce even greater electric marvels. In fact, so rapid and brilliant has been the development that in the brilliancy some of the pioneers in the work have been almost forgotten, except by the specialist and the student, and it is no small part of this sketch to do them honor. The tiny spark of Faraday may be lost in the brilliancy of the million-candle-power search-light, yet the brilliancy of the search-light but enhances the wonder of the discovery of the spark. ”

“ It needs power to live right, to do right, to love God and man, to pity the fallen, to relieve the needy, the power of being good, of leading a spiritual life. This power it finds in Christ and the whole tendency of the religious life of the century is to get back to him. Conduct rather than creed, love rather than theology, have been the watchwords of the church. The spirit of Christ, His teachings, His character, His example, are the centre of attraction which holds His church together and endues it with the power which shall yet subdue the world. ”

“ Importers, anxious for merchandise, have stood ready to receive the plague, and plant it without regard to consequences. But in the midst of all this, a new power has arisen in the world, and standing with face to the east, has drawn a sword, before the circle of which even the spectral shadow of cholera has quailed and gone back! Humanity might well break out in rhapsody and jubilee over this great victory. ”

“ The discovery of the planet Neptune by Dr. Galle on the twenty-third of September, 1846, was one of the most important events in the intellectual history of this century. Certainly it was no small thing to find a new world. Discoverers on the surface of our globe are immortalized by finding new lands in unknown regions. What, therefore, should be the fame of him who finds a new world in the depths of space? ”

“ On the spot where French patriotism afterward planted the bronze lion to commemorate forever the extinction of the Old Guard of the French Empire, and of Napoleon the Great, the traveler from strange lands pauses, at the distance of eighty years from the horrible cataclysm, and reflects with wonder how within the memory of living men human nature could have been raised by the passion of battle to such sublime heroism as that displayed in these wheatfields and orchards where the Old Guard of France sank into oblivion, but rose to immortal fame. ”

“ If human history had the slightest regard for the calendars of mankind—if the eternal verities depended in any measure on the almanac or the division of time into this age or that—we might look with wonder on the remarkable coincidence which made the discovery of the first asteroid to happen in the first evening twilight of the first day of the nineteenth century! ”

“ This century has been the epoch of investigation into the nature of the imponderable forces. Sound and light and heat have been known as the principal agents of sensation since the first ages of man-life on the earth; but their nature has not been well understood until within the memories of men still living. Electricity was also vaguely known—but very indistinctly—from ancient times. It has remained for the scientific investigators of our age to enter into the secret parts of nature and lay bare to the understanding many of the hitherto unknown facts relating to the imponderable agents. ”

“ On turning the telescope to a fixed star, its brightness, its brilliancy, increases according to the power of the instrument. Coming into the field of one of these great suns of space, the telescope shows a miraculous dawn spreading and blazing into a glorious sunrise, and a sun itself flaming like infinite majesty on the sight ”

“ Nor does it require a great stretch of the imagination to see in the invention of the phonograph one of the greatest achievements of the age—a discovery, indeed, which may possibly revolutionize the whole method of learning.
It would seem clear that nature has intended the ear, rather than the eye, to be the organ of education. It is manifestly against the fitness of things that the eyes of all mankind should be strained, weakened, permanently injured in childhood, with the unnatural tasks which are imposed upon the delicate organ. ”

“ A given sound is produced, and the same sound is heard by some ear at a distance. All the people of the world are telephoning to one another; for oral speech leaping from the vocal organs of one human being to the ear of another is always telephonic. It is only when this phenomenon of speech at a distance is taken from the soft wings of the air, confined to a wire, and made to fly along the slender thread and deliver itself afar in a manner to which the world has hitherto been a stranger that the thing done and the apparatus by which it is done seem miraculous. ”

“ On the seventh of August, Scott, with his reduced forces, began his march over the crest of the mountains against the city of Mexico. The American army, sweeping over the heights, looked down on the valley. Never before had a soldiery in a foreign land beheld a grander scene [pg 85] Clear to the horizon stretched a living landscape of green fields, villages, and lakes—a picture too beautiful to be marred with the dreadful enginery of war. ”

“ THE ABOLITION OF HUMAN BONDAGE.
Certainly no greater deed of philanthropy has been accomplished by mankind than the extinction of human servitude. True, that horrible relic of antiquity has not yet been wholly obliterated from the world, but the nineteenth century has dealt upon it such staggering and fatal blows as have driven it from all the high places of civilization and made it crouch in obscure corners and unenlightened regions on the outskirts of paganism. Slavery has not indeed been extinguished ”

“ At all events, the history of the telephone, belonging so distinctly to our own age, will stand as a reminder to after times of the great stride which the human race made in inventive skill and scientific progress in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. ”

“ The transmission of energy by the electric current from a central plant makes possible many small industries that could not exist without it, and gives employment and happiness to hundreds. The art of Electro-metallurgy seems but the development of months: yet it already employs millions of capital and is adding thousands daily to the world's wealth. Steam and wind and tide contribute to the work. Even Niagara is being touched by the spirit of the time and sends her wasting energy thrilling through the electric wires to turn the wheels of many busy factories. ”

“ The illumination of a city by night, making its streets to be lighted as if by day, is a more interesting and important fact in human history than any political conflict or mere change of rulers.
About the beginning of the eighth decade of this century the project of introducing the electric light for general purposes of illumination began to be agitated. It was at once perceived that the advantages of such lighting were as many as they were obvious. The light is so powerful as to render practicable the performance of many mechanical operations as easily by night as by day. ”

“ The fear which mankind have long entertained on account of plagues and epidemics, and the loss which the animal industries of the world have sustained, were largely abated. As yet the use of the Pasteur methods for the prevention and cure of disease is by no means universal; but the knowledge which has come of his investigations and of the results of them has diffused itself among all civilized nations, and the hygienic condition of almost every community has been most favorably affected by the new knowledge which we possess of bacteria and of the means of destroying them. ”

“ Before the sun,
Before the heavens thou wert, and at the voice
Of God, as with a mantle, didst invest
The rising world of waters dark and deep,
Won from the void and formless infinite."
How then shall man overcome the darkness? It is one of the problems of his existence. He is obliged with each recurring sunset of his life to enter the tunnel of inky darkness and make his way through as best he may to the morning. What kind of lantern shall he carry as he gropes? ”

“ The appearance of the simple instrument has been one of the many harbingers of the oncoming better time, when the interchange of thought and sentiment between man and man, community and community, nation and nation, and race and race shall be the preliminary of universal peace in the world and of the good-fellowship of mankind.
Every such fact as the invention of the telephone, produces a complex and almost indescribable result in human society. ”

“ One fact, however, should ever be kept in mind: Whatever may be the extent of the superstructure of electrical science, it is all built upon the foundation of electro-magnetic induction laid by Michael Faraday. The little "magnetic spark" he first produced, and the trembling of his galvanometer-needle, were but signals of the birth of the giant of the century.
These are the days of electricity and steel, and a fitting part of the intense age in which they exist. That we have as yet seen but a partial development of the possibilities of the electrical discovery, no one can doubt. ”

“ There were anti-slavery leaders, statesmen, philosophers and philanthropists. By the terms of the Constitution the slave trade should cease in the year 1808. Sad to reflect that the inventive genius of man and the prodigality of nature in her gifts of cotton, sugar and rice to the old South should have produced a reaction in favor of slavery so great as to fasten it more strongly than ever upon our country.
The fact is, that to all human seeming at the middle of our century American slavery seemed to be more firmly established than ever before. ”

“ Such is the timidity of the human mind—such its conservative attachment to the known thing and to the old method as against the new—that it prefers to stay in the tumble-down ruin of bygone opinions and practices, rather than go up and inhabit the splendid but unfamiliar temple of the future. ”

“ TELEGRAPHING BEFORE MORSE.
There is a great fallacy in the judgment of mankind about the method of the coming of new things. People imagine that new things come all at once, but they do not. Nothing comes all at once; that is, no thing. In the facts of the natural world, that is, among visible phenomena of the landscape, the judgment of people is soon corrected. There it is seen that everything grows. The growth is sometimes slow and sometimes rapid; but everything comes gradually out of its antecedents. ”

“ As to electricity in its various forms and manifestations, that sublime and powerful agent began to be better known just before the middle of the century. Since that time there has been almost constant progress in the science of this great force, until at the present time it is handled, controlled and understood in its phenomena almost as easily as water is poured into a vessel, air compressed under a piston, or hydrogen made to inflate a balloon.
It has remained, however, for the last half decade of the great century to come upon and investigate a hitherto unknown force in nature. ”

“ While Daniel O'Connell, the greatest Irishman of the present century, despairing of the cause of his country, lay dying in Genoa, and while Zachary Taylor, at the head of a handful of American soldiers was cooping up the Mexican army in the old town of Monterey, a new world, 37,000 miles in diameter and seventeen times as great in mass as the little world on which we dwell, was found slowly and sublimely making its way around the well nigh inconceivable periphery of the solar system! ”

“ It is the common hydrogen and carbon and oxygen and nitrogen of our earth and its envelope. It is the soda of our bread; the potassa of our ashes; the phosphorus of our bones and brain! Indeed, the universe throughout is of one form and one substance, and there is one Father over all. Sooner or later the concepts of science and of religion will come together; and the small agitations and conflicts of human thought and hope will pass away in a sublime unity of human faith. [pg 184]
Progress in Discovery and Invention. ”

“ The cathode rays are not light. They are not sound. They are not electricity or magnetism. They are not heat. They are not any of the known forms of force. They seem to be a new transformation of some one or more of the known agents. It has long been observed that motion is accompanied with sound, and that motion also, if increased, becomes manifest in heat. It is known that heat is convertible into light, and light into electricity.
It is possible that at the bottom of all these phenomena lies the force of gravitation. This force is absolute and universal. ”

“ Any account of the scientific progress of this century which omits the name of Louis Pasteur would be lamentably incomplete. In that part of science which relates strictly to human life and the means of preserving it, the work of this great man must be placed in the first rank. Indeed, we believe that no other stride in biological investigation from the beginning of time has been so great in its immediate and prospective results as has been the increment contributed by Pasteur and his contemporary Koch. ”

“ It struck the Union line. There was a momentary melee among the guns, and then all was over. Hancock's infantry rose with flash on flash from among the rocks by which they were partially protected. The Confederates were scattered in broken groups. Retreat was well-nigh impossible. The impact of the charge was utterly broken, and the Confederate line was blown into rout and ruin. Victory hovered over the National army. The Confederate forces staggered away under the blow of defeat. Night came down on a broken and virtually hopeless cause. The field was covered with the dead and dying. ”