esources
of the mechanic and the chemist, the engineer and the artist, with issue
attested by all its own fertility, while its rays reveal province after
province undreamed of, and indeed unexisting, before its advent.

Every other primal gift of man rises to a new height at the bidding of
the electrician. All the deftness and skill that have followed from the
upright attitude, in its creation of the human hand, have been brought
to a new edge and a broader range through electric art. Between the uses
of flame and electricity have sprung up alliances which have created new
wealth for the miner and the metal-worker, the manufacturer and the
shipmaster, with new insights for the man of research. Articulate speech
borne on electric waves makes itself heard half-way across America, and
words reduced to the symbols of symbols--expressed in the perforations
of a strip of paper--take flight through a telegraph wire at twenty-fold
the pace of speech. Because the latest leap in knowledge and faculty has
been won by the electrician, he has widened the scientific outlook
vastly more than any explorer who went before. Beyond any predecessor,
he began with a better equipment and a larger capital to prove the
gainfulness which ever attends the exploiting a supreme agent of
discovery.

As we trace a few of the unending interlacements of electrical science
and art with other sciences and arts, and study their mutually
stimulating effects, we shall be reminded of a series of permutations
where the latest of the factors, because latest, multiplies all prior
factors in an unexampled degree.[5] We shall find reason to believe that
this is not merely a suggestive analogy, but really true as a tendency,
not only with regard to man's gains by the conquest of electricity, but
also with respect to every other signal victory which has brought him to
his present pinnacle of discernment and rule. If this permutative
principle in former advances lay undetected, it stands forth clearly in
that latest accession to skill and interpretation which has been ushered
in by Franklin and Volta, Faraday and Henry.

Although of much less moment than the triumphs of the electrician, the
discovery of photography ranks second in importance among the scientific
feats of the nineteenth century. The camera is an artificial eye with
almost every power of the human retina, and with many that are denied
to vision--however ingeniously fortified by the lens-maker. A br