many and varied that
the history of them occupies a volume.[4] Upon the small, homogeneous
community inhabiting one of the Hebrides, the electric telegraph would
produce, were it used, scarcely any results; but in England the results
it produces are multitudinous. The comparatively simple organisation
under which our ancestors lived five centuries ago, could have undergone
but few modifications from an event like the recent one at Canton; but
now the legislative decision respecting it sets up many hundreds of
complex modifications, each of which will be the parent of numerous
future ones.

Space permitting, we could willingly have pursued the argument in
relation to all the subtler results of civilisation. As before, we
showed that the law of Progress to which the organic and inorganic
worlds conform, is also conformed to by Language, Sculpture, Music,
etc.; so might we here show that the cause which we have hitherto found
to determine Progress holds in these cases also. We might demonstrate in
detail how, in Science, an advance of one division presently advances
other divisions--how Astronomy has been immensely forwarded by
discoveries in Optics, while other optical discoveries have initiated
Microscopic Anatomy, and greatly aided the growth of Physiology--how
Chemistry has indirectly increased our knowledge of Electricity,
Magnetism, Biology, Geology--how Electricity has reacted on Chemistry
and Magnetism, developed our views of Light and Heat, and disclosed
sundry laws of nervous action.

In Literature the same truth might be exhibited in the manifold effects
of the primitive mystery-play, not only as originating the modern drama,
but as affecting through it other kinds of poetry and fiction; or in the
still multiplying forms of periodical literature that have descended
from the first newspaper, and which have severally acted and reacted on
other forms of literature and on each other. The influence which a new
school of Painting--as that of the pre-Raffaelites--exercises upon other
schools; the hints which all kinds of pictorial art are deriving from
Photography; the complex results of new critical doctrines, as those of
Mr. Ruskin, might severally be dwelt upon as displaying the like
multiplication of effects. But it would needlessly tax the reader's
patience to pursue, in their many ramifications, these various changes:
here become so involved and subtle as to be followed with some
difficulty.

Without further