scientific period has a proper contempt for all such superstitions. We
now know that the 'Fons Juventutis' is in every man, and that if actually
juvenility cannot be renewed, the advance of age can be arrested and the
waste of tissues be prevented, and an uncalculated length of earthly
existence be secured, by the injection of some sort of fluid into the
system. The right fluid has not yet been discovered by science, but
millions of people thought that it had the other day, and now confidently
expect it. This credulity has a scientific basis, and has no relation to
the old absurd belief in Bimini. We thank goodness that we do not live in
a credulous age.

The world would be in a poor case indeed if it had not always before it
some ideal or millennial condition, some panacea, some transmutation of
base metals into gold, some philosopher's stone, some fountain of youth,
some process of turning charcoal into diamonds, some scheme for
eliminating evil. But it is worth mentioning that in the historical
evolution we have always got better things than we sought or imagined,
developments on a much grander scale. History is strewn with the wreck of
popular delusions, but always in place of them have come realizations
more astonishing than the wildest fancies of the dreamers. Florida was a
disappointment as a Bimini, so were the land of the Ohio, the land of the
Mississippi, the Dorado of the Pacific coast. But as the illusions,
pushed always westward, vanished in the light of common day, lo! a
continent gradually emerged, with millions of people animated by
conquering ambition of progress in freedom; an industrial continent,
covered with a network of steel, heated by steam, and lighted by
electricity. What a spectacle of youth on a grand scale is this!
Christopher Columbus had not the slightest conception of what he was
doing when he touched the button. But we are not satisfied. Quite as far
from being so as ever. The popular imagination runs a hard race with any
possible natural development. Being in possession of so much, we now
expect to travel in the air, to read news in the sending mind before it
is sent, to create force without cost, to be transported without time,
and to make everybody equal in fortune and happiness to everybody else by
act of Congress. Such confidence have we in the power of a "resolution"
of the people and by the people that it seems feasible to make women into
men, oblivious of the more important and