e more favored race. And it is highly important,
therefore, that we should make note of what the race has achieved along
this line to the end that proper credit may be accorded it as having
made some contribution to our national progress.

Standing foremost in the list of things that have actually done most to
promote our national progress in all material ways is the item of
inventions. Without inventions we should have had no agricultural
implements with which to till the fertile fields of our vast continent;
no mining machinery for recovering the rich treasure that for centuries
lay hidden beneath our surface; no steamcar or steamboat for
transporting the products of field and mine; no machinery for converting
those products into other forms of commercial needs; no telegraph or
telephone for the speedy transmission of messages, no means for
discovering and controlling the various utilitarian applications of
electricity; no one of those delicate instruments which enable the
skilful surgeon of to-day to transform and renew the human body, and
often to make life itself stand erect, as it were, in the very presence
of death. Without inventions we could have none of those numerous
instruments which to-day in the hands of the scientist enable him
accurately to forecast the weather, to anticipate and provide against
storms on land and at sea, to detect seismic disturbances and warn
against the dangers incident to their repetition; and no wireless
telegraphy with its manifold blessings to humanity.

All these great achievements have come to us from the hand of the
inventor. He it is who has enabled us to inhabit the air above us, to
tunnel the earth beneath, explore the mysteries of the sea, and in a
thousand ways, unknown to our forefathers, multiply human comforts and
minimize human misery. Indeed, it is difficult to recall a single
feature of our national progress along material lines that has not been
vitalized by the touch of the inventor's genius.

Into this vast yet specific field of scientific industry the colored man
has, contrary to the belief of many, made his entry, and has brought to
his work in it that same degree of patient inquisitiveness, plodding
industry and painstaking experiment that has so richly rewarded others
in the same line of endeavor, namely, the endeavor both to create new
things and to effect such new combinations of old things as will adapt
them to new uses. We know that the colored man has a