names of those who may have claims to rank as the originators of
ideas. While for purposes of convenience, history labels certain great
inventive movements, each with the name of one pre-eminent individual
who has contributed largely to its success, nothing like a due
appraisement of the services rendered by other men is ever attempted.
It is not even as if the commanding general should by public
acclamation receive all the applause for a successful campaign to the
exclusion of his lieutenants. The pioneers in each great department of
invention have generally acted as forerunners of the men whose names
have become the most famous. They have borne much of the heat and
burden of the day, while their successors have reaped the fruits of
triumph. Mr. Herbert Spencer's strong protest against the part
assigned by some writers in the mental and industrial evolution of the
human race to the influence of great men is certainly fully justified,
if the attribute of greatness is to be ascribed only to those whose
names figure in current histories. The parts performed by others,
whose fate it may have been to have fallen into comparatively
unfavourable environments, may have entitled them even more eminently
to the acclamation of greatness.

The world in such a matter asks, reasonably enough under the
circumstances, Shall we omit to honour any of the great men who have
played important parts in an industrial movement, assigning as our
motive the difficulty of enumerating so many names? For the
encouragement of those to whom the ambition for fame acts as a great
stimulus to self-devotion in the interests of human progress, it is
unavoidable that some men should be singled out and made heroes, while
the much more numerous class of those who have also done great work,
but who have not been quite so successful, must pass out of the ken of
all, excepting the few who possess an expert knowledge of the various
subjects which they have taken in hand.

Still the distortion to which history has been subjected through its
biographical mode of treatment must always be reckoned with as a
factor of possible error by any one attempting to read the riddle of
the past, and it may offer a still more dangerous snare to one who
tries to deduce the future course of events from the evidences of the
past, and the promises which they hold out. People are naturally prone
to take it for granted that the world's progress during the first part
of the twenti