with which
man can never cope, and give up all attempts to grapple with it?

[Illustration with caption: PROFESSOR LANGLEY'S AIR-SHIP]

The fact is that invention and discovery have, notwithstanding their
seemingly wide extent, gone on in rather narrower lines than is
commonly supposed. If, a hundred years ago, the most sagacious of
mortals had been told that before the nineteenth century closed the
face of the earth would be changed, time and space almost annihilated,
and communication between continents made more rapid and easy than it
was between cities in his time; and if he had been asked to exercise
his wildest imagination in depicting what might come--the airship and
the flying-machine would probably have had a prominent place in his
scheme, but neither the steamship, the railway, the telegraph, nor the
telephone would have been there. Probably not a single new agency which
he could have imagined would have been one that has come to pass.

It is quite clear to me that success must await progress of a different
kind from that which the inventors of flying-machines are aiming at. We
want a great discovery, not a great invention. It is an unfortunate
fact that we do not always appreciate the distinction between progress
in scientific discovery and ingenious application of discovery to the
wants of civilization. The name of Marconi is familiar to every ear;
the names of Maxwell and Herz, who made the discoveries which rendered
wireless telegraphy possible, are rarely recalled. Modern progress is
the result of two factors: Discoveries of the laws of nature and of
actions or possibilities in nature, and the application of such
discoveries to practical purposes. The first is the work of the
scientific investigator, the second that of the inventor.

In view of the scientific discoveries of the past ten years, which,
after bringing about results that would have seemed chimerical if
predicted, leading on to the extraction of a substance which seems to
set the laws and limits of nature at defiance by radiating a flood of
heat, even when cooled to the lowest point that science can reach--a
substance, a few specks of which contain power enough to start a
railway train, and embody perpetual motion itself, almost--he would be
a bold prophet who would set any limit to possible discoveries in the
realm of nature. We are binding the universe together by agencies which
pass from sun to planet and from star to star. We are deter