words can be preserved
into the future. In the light of a new discovery, we are apt to wonder
why our fathers were so blind as not to see it. When a new invention
has been made, we ask ourselves, Why was it not thought of before? The
discovery seems obvious, and the invention simple, after we know them.
Now that speech itself can be sent a thousand miles away, or heard a
thousand years after, we discern in these achievements two goals toward
which we have been making, and at which we should arrive some day. We
marvel that we had no prescience of these, and that we did not attain
to them sooner. Why has it taken so many generations to reach a foregone
conclusion? Alas! they neither knew the conclusion nor the means of
attaining to it. Man works from ignorance towards greater knowledge with
very limited powers. His little circle of light is surrounded by a wall
of darkness, which he strives to penetrate and lighten, now groping
blindly on its verge, now advancing his taper light and peering forward;
yet unable to go far, and even afraid to venture, in case he should be
lost.

To the Infinite Intelligence which knows all that is hidden in that
darkness, and all that man will discover therein, how poor a thing
is the telephone or phonograph, how insignificant are all his 'great
discoveries'! This thought should imbue a man of science with humility
rather than with pride. Seen from another standpoint than his own, from
without the circle of his labours, not from within, in looking back, not
forward, even his most remarkable discovery is but the testimony of his
own littleness. The veil of darkness only serves to keep these little
powers at work. Men have sometimes a foreshadowing of what will come to
pass without distinctly seeing it. In mechanical affairs, the notion of
a telegraph is very old, and probably immemorial. Centuries ago the poet
and philosopher entertained the idea of two persons far apart being able
to correspond through the sympathetic property of the lodestone. The
string or lovers' telephone was known to the Chinese, and even the
electric telephone was thought about some years before it was invented.
Bourseul, Reis, and others preceded Graham Bell.

The phonograph was more of a surprise; but still it was no exception to
the rule. Naturally, men and women had desired to preserve the accents
as well as the lineaments of some beloved friend who had passed away.
The Chinese have a legend of a mother whose voi