fuel, the smelting of iron upon a larger scale than men had ever

done before, the steam pumping engine, the steam-engine and the
steam-boat, followed one another in an order that had a kind of

logical necessity. It is the most interesting and instructive
chapter in the history of the human intelligence, the history of

steam from its beginning as a fact in human consciousness to the
perfection of the great turbine engines that preceded the

utilisation of intra-molecular power. Nearly every human being
must have seen steam, seen it incuriously for many thousands of

years; the women in particular were always heating water, boiling
it, seeing it boil away, seeing the lids of vessels dance with

its fury; millions of people at different times must have watched
steam pitching rocks out of volcanoes like cricket balls and

blowing pumice into foam, and yet you may search the whole human
record through, letters, books, inscriptions, pictures, for any

glimmer of a realisation that here was force, here was strength
to borrow and use.... Then suddenly man woke up to it, the

railways spread like a network over the globe, the ever enlarging
iron steamships began their staggering fight against wind and

wave.
Steam was the first-comer in the new powers, it was the beginning

of the Age of Energy that was to close the long history of the
Warring States.

But for a long time men did not realise the importance of this
novelty. They would not recognise, they were not able to

recognise that anything mental" target="_blank" title="a.基本的 n.原理">fundamental had happened to their
immemorial necessities. They called the steam-engine the 'iron

horse' and pretended that they had made the most partial of
substitutions. Steam machinery and factory production were

visibly revolutionising the conditions of industrial production,
population was streaming steadily in from the country-side and

concentrating in hitherto unthought-of masses about a few city
centres, food was coming to them over enormous distances upon a

scale that made the one sole precedent, the corn ships of
imperial Rome, a petty incident; and a huge migration of peoples

between Europe and Western Asia and America was in Progress,
and--nobody seems to have realised that something new had come

into human life, a strange swirl different altogether from any
previous circling and mutation, a swirl like the swirl when at

last the lock gates begin to open after a long phase of
accumulating water and eddying inactivity....

The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could
sit at his breakfast-table, decide between tea from Ceylon or

coffee from Brazil, devour an egg from France with some Danish
ham, or eat a New Zealand chop, wind up his breakfast with a West

Indian banana, glance at the latest telegrams from all the world,
scrutinise the prices current of his geographically distributed

investments in South Africa, Japan, and Egypt, and tell the two
children he had begotten (in the place of his father's eight)

that he thought the world changed very little. They must play
cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the old school he had gone

to, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few scraps of
Horace and Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads, and all

would be well with them....
Section 5

Electricity, though it was perhaps the earlier of the two to be
studied, invaded the common life of men a few decades after the

exploitation of steam. To electricity also, in spite of its
provocative nearness all about him, mankind had been utterly

blind for incalculable ages. Could anything be more emphatic than
the appeal of electricity for attention? It thundered at man's

ears, it signalled to him in blinding flashes, occasionally it
killed him, and he could not see it as a thing that concerned him

enough to merit study. It came into the house with the cat on any
dry day and crackled insinuatingly whenever he stroked her fur.

It rotted his metals when he put them together.... There is no
single record that any one questioned why the cat's fur crackles

or why hair is so unruly to brush on a frosty day, before the
sixteenth century. For endless years man seems to have done his

very successful best not to think about it at all; until this new
spirit of the Seeker turned itself to these things.

How often things must have been seen and dismissed as
unimportant, before the speculative eye and the moment of vision

came! It was Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth's court physician, who
first puzzled his brains with rubbed amber and bits of glass and

silk and shellac, and so began the quickening of the human mind
to the existence of this universal presence. And even then the

science of electricity remained a mere little group of curious
facts for nearly two hundred years, connected perhaps with

magnetism--a mere guess that--perhaps with the lightning. Frogs'
legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron railings and

twitched upon countless occasions before Galvani saw them.
Except for the lightningconductor, it was 250 years after

Gilbert before electricity stepped out of the cabinet of
scientific curiosities into the life of the common man.... Then

suddenly, in the half-century between 1880 and 1930, it ousted
the steam-engine and took over traction, it ousted every other

form of household heating, abolished distance with the perfected
wireless telephone and the telephotograph....

Section 6
And there was an extraordinarymentalresistance to discovery and

invention for at least a hundred years after the scientific
revolution had begun. Each new thing made its way into practice

against a scepticism that amounted at times to hostility. One
writer upon these subjects gives a funny little domestic

conversation that happened, he says, in the year 1898, within ten
years, that is to say, of the time when the first aviators were

fairly on the wing. He tells us how he sat at his desk in his
study and conversed with his little boy.

His little boy was in profound trouble. He felt he had to speak
very seriously to his father, and as he was a kindly little boy

he did not want to do it too harshly.
This is what happened.

'I wish, Daddy,' he said, coming to his point, 'that you wouldn't
write all this stuff about flying. The chaps rot me.'

'Yes!' said his father.
'And old Broomie, the Head I mean, he rots me. Everybody rots

me.'
'But there is going to be flying--quite soon.'

The little boy was too well bred to say what he thought of that.
'Anyhow,' he said, 'I wish you wouldn't write about it.'

'You'll fly--lots of times--before you die,' the father assured
him.

The little boy looked unhappy.
The father hesitated. Then he opened a drawer and took out a

blurred and under-developed photograph. 'Come and look at this,'
he said.

The little boy came round to him. The photograph showed a stream
and a meadow beyond, and some trees, and in the air a black,

pencil-like object with flat wings on either side of it. It was
the first record of the first apparatus heavier than air that

ever maintained itself in the air by mechanical force. Across the
margin was written: 'Here we go up, up, up--from S. P. Langley,

Smithsonian Institution, Washington.'
The father watched the effect of this reassuring document upon

his son. 'Well?' he said.
'That,' said the schoolboy, after reflection, 'is only a model.'

'Model to-day, man to-morrow.'
The boy seemed divided in his allegiance. Then he decided for

what he believed quite firmly to be omniscience. 'But old
Broomie,' he said, 'he told all the boys in his class only

yesterday, "no man will ever fly." No one, he says, who has ever
shot grouse or pheasants on the wing would ever believe anything