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The World Set Free-Part2_H. G. WELLS (1866-1946)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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and gazed at circling stars in the sky and mused upon the coin

and crystal in his hand. Whenever there was a certain leisure for



thought throughout these times, then men were to be found

dissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with



the assurances of orthodoxbelief, uneasy with a sense of unread

symbols in the world about them, questioning the finality of



scholastic wisdom. Through all the ages of history there were

men to whom this whisper had come of hidden things about them.



They could no longer lead ordinary lives nor content themselves

with the common things of this world once they had heard this



voice. And mostly they believed not only that all this world was

as it were a painted curtain before things unguessed at, but that



these secrets were Power. Hitherto Power had come to men by

chance, but now there were these seekers seeking, seeking among



rare and curious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some

odd utilisable thing, sometimes deceiving themselves with fancied



discovery, sometimes pretending to find. The world of every day

laughed at these eccentric beings, or found them annoying and



ill-treated them, or was seized with fear and made saints and

sorcerers and warlocks of them, or with covetousness and



entertained them hopefully; but for the greater part heeded them

not at all. Yet they were of the blood of him who had first



dreamt of attacking the mammoth; every one of them was of his

blood and descent; and the thing they sought, all unwittingly,



was the snare that will some day catch the sun.

Section 3



Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court

of Sforza in Milan in a state of dignified abstraction. His



common-place books are full of propheticsubtlety and ingenious

anticipations of the methods of the early aviators. Durer was his



parallel and Roger Bacon--whom the Franciscans silenced--of his

kindred. Such a man again in an earlier city was Hero of



Alexandria, who knew of the power of steam nineteen hundred years

before it was first brought into use. And earlier still was



Archimedes of Syracuse, and still earlier the legendary Daedalus

of Cnossos. All up and down the record of history whenever there



was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekers appeared.

And half the alchemists were of their tribe.



When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder one might

have supposed that men would have gone at once to the explosive



engine. But they could see nothing of the sort. They were not

yet beginning to think of seeing things; their metallurgy was all



too poor to make such engines even had they thought of them. For

a time they could not make instruments sound enough to stand this



new force even for so rough a purpose as hurling a missile. Their

first guns had barrels of coopered timber, and the world waited



for more than five hundred years before the explosive engine

came.



Even when the seekers found, it was at first a long journey

before the world could use their findings for any but the



roughest, most obvious purposes. If man in general was not still

as absolutely blind to the unconquered energies about him as his



paleolithic precursor, he was at best purblind.

Section 4



The latentenergy of coal and the power of steam waited long on

the verge of discovery, before they began to influence human



lives.

There were no doubt many such devices as Hero's toys devised and



forgotten, time after time, in courts and palaces, but it needed

that coal should be mined and burning with plenty of iron at hand



before it dawned upon men that here was something more than a

curiosity. And it is to be remarked that the first recorded



suggestion for the use of steam was in war; there is an

Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is proposed to fire shot out of



corked iron bottles full of heated water. The mining of coal for




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