wax cylinder and send it to the antipodes, and our
friends there, with a similar instrument, can not only hear and
recognise our very voice, but can make that voice repeat our thoughts
audibly, to a thousand others at the same time, and can repeat that
process for hundreds of times without exhausting that voice. With
another instrument we can depict on a film, not only the images of our
friends but their very actions, which may also be sent to any
distance, and the persons, thereon depicted, may be seen by their
relatives alive and going about their everyday employments, with every
movement exact to life. We can cross the Ocean against the wind and
waves by means of harnessed sunbeams, without any exertion of our own,
at the rate of an express train, which train, by the by, is also moved
by the same means; we can dive to the bottom of the sea and journey
there for hours, in perfect safety, without coming to the surface, and
we are even developing wings, or their equivalent, which from
immemorial tradition we were not to possess before we had finished
doing our duty properly in this world and had gained admission to the
next.

We can do all these things, but how ignorant we still are in the
commonest doings of Nature! By giving up our whole lifetime, and
spending millions of pounds, we could never make a grain of wheat or
an acorn, and wherever we turn we find ourselves confronted with
mysteries beyond our power to explain from a finite material
standpoint; even in material vibrations we meet a mystery almost
beyond our power to comprehend. Take for instance those small insects,
of the family of Grasshoppers, which make the primaeval woods of
Central America give out a noise like the roaring of the sea, a
wondrous sound never to be forgotten by those who have heard it. By
means of a kind of rasp one of these insects creates a sound which
Darwin states can be heard to the distance of one mile: these insects
weigh less than the hundredth part of an ounce, and the instrument by
which the noise is made, weighs much less than one-tenth of the total
insect; it is less therefore than one thousandth part of an ounce in
weight, and yet it is found, by calculation, that this small
instrument is actually able to move at the enormous rate of a thousand
vibrations per second and keep in motion for hours, from five to ten
million tons of matter, and it does this so powerfully that every
particle of that enormous bulk of matter gives