Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 | Page 6

while others had the power of immense propagation,
and produced an innumerable offspring, which have a family likeness
to this day. The law of cause and effect has no better illustration than
the history of inventions and discoveries. If there were among us an
intellect sufficiently encyclopedic in knowledge and versatile in genius,
it could take every one of these facts and trace its intricate lineage of
principles and mechanisms, step by step, up to the original Adam of the
first invention and the original Eve of the first necessity.
There is a period between us and these first parents of our present
progress that is strangely obscure. It is a sort of antediluvian age, in
which there were evidently stupendous mechanical powers of some
kind, and an extensive acquaintance with some things. The ruins of
Egypt alone would prove this. But a deluge of oblivion has washed
over them, and left these colossal bones to tell what story they can. The
only way to account for such an extinction is, that they were monstrous
contrivances out of all proportion to their age, spasmodic successes in
science, wonders born out of due time,--deriving no sustenance or
support from a wide and various kindred, and therefore, like the giants
which were of old, dying out with their day.
It is different with what has taken place since. Every work has come in
its right time, just when best prepared for, and most required. There is
not one but is sustained on every side, and fits into its place, as each
new piece of colored stone in a mosaic is sustained by the progressive
picture. Every one is conserved by its connections. Whatever has been
done is sure,--and the past being secure, the future is guarantied. It is
impossible that the present knowledge in the world should be
extinguished. Nothing but a stroke of imbecility upon the race, nothing
but the destruction of its libraries, nothing but the paralysis of the
printing-press, and the annihilation of these means of
intercommunication,--nothing but some such arbitrary intervention
could accomplish it. The facts already in human possession, and the
constitution of the mind, together insure what we have as imperishable,
and what we are to obtain as illimitable.
We come now to another suggestive characteristic of the time,--another
of its promises. So far we find Progress gathering fulness and

strength,--making sure of itself. It has also been gathering impetus. It
has been, all along, accumulating momentum, and now it sweeps on
with breathless rapidity. The reason is, that, the farther it has gone, the
more it has multiplied its agents. The present generation is not only
carried forward, but is excited in every quarter. The activity and
versatility of the intellect would appear to be inexhaustible. Instead of
getting overstrained, or becoming lethargic, it never was so powerful,
never had so many resources, never was so wide-awake. Men are busy
turning over every stone in their way, in the hope of finding something
new. Nothing would seem too small for human attention, nothing too
great for human undertaking. The government Patent-Office, with its
countless chambers, is not so large a museum of inventions as the
capacious brain of to-day.
One man is engrossed over an apple-parer; another snatches the needle
from the weary fingers of the seamstress, and offers her in return the
sewing-machine. That man yonder has turned himself into an armory,
and he brings out the deadliest instrument he can produce, something
perhaps that can shoot you at sight, even though you be a speck in the
horizon. His next-door neighbor is an iron workshop, and is forging an
armor of proof for a vessel of war, from which the mightiest balls shall
bound as lightly as the arrows from an old-time breastplate. There is
another searching for that new motive power which shall keep pace
with the telegraph, and hurl the bodies of men through space as fast as
their thoughts are hurled; there is another seeking that electro-magnetic
battery which shall speak instantly and distinctly to the ends of the
earth. The mind of that astronomer is a telescope, through whose
increasing field new worlds float daily by; the mind of that geologist is
a divining-rod, forever bending toward the waters of chaos, and
pointing out new places where a shaft can be sunk into periods of
almost infinite antiquity; the mind of that chemist is a subtile crucible,
in which aboriginal secrets lie disclosed, and within whose depths the
true philosopher's stone will be found; the mind of that mathematician
is a maze of ethereal stair-ways, rising higher and higher toward the
heaven of truth.
The ambition is everywhere,--in every breast; the power is
everywhere,--in every brain. The giant and the pigmy are alike active in
seeking out and finding out