s. Nihil per saltum. By
slow and often painful steps Nature's secrets have been mastered. Not
an effort has been made but has had its influence. For no human labour
is altogether lost; some remnant of useful effect surviving for the
benefit of the race, if not of the individual. Even attempts
apparently useless have not really been so, but have served in some way
to advance man to higher knowledge, skill, or discipline. "The loss of
a position gained," says Professor Thomson, "is an event unknown in the
history of man's struggle with the forces of inanimate nature." A
single step won gives a firmer foothold for further effort. The man
may die, but the race survives and continues the work,--to use the
poet's simile, mounting on stepping-stones of dead selves to higher
selves.

Philarete Chasles, indeed, holds that it is the Human Race that is your
true inventor: "As if to unite all generations," he says, "and to show
that man can only act efficiently by association with others, it has
been ordained that each inventor shall only interpret the first word of
the problem he sets himself to solve, and that every great idea shall
be the RESUME of the past at the same time that it is the germ of the
future." And rarely does it happen that any discovery or invention of
importance is made by one man alone. The threads of inquiry are taken
up and traced, one labourer succeeding another, each tracing it a
little further, often without apparent result. This goes on sometimes
for centuries, until at length some man, greater perhaps than his
fellows, seeking to fulfil the needs of his time, gathers the various
threads together, treasures up the gain of past successes and failures,
and uses them as the means for some solid achievement, Thus Newton
discovered the law of gravitation, and thus James Watt invented the
steam-engine. So also of the Locomotive, of which Robert Stephenson
said, "It has not been the invention of any one man, but of a race of
mechanical engineers." Or, as Joseph Bramah observed, in the preamble
to his second Lock patent, "Among the number of patents granted there
are comparatively few which can be called original so that it is
difficult to say where the boundary of one ends and where that of
another begins."

The arts are indeed reared but slowly; and it was a wise observation of
Lord Bacon that we are too apt to pass those ladders by which they have
been reared, and reflect the whole merit on th