intimacy of one who has tried, fiction can never be satisfactory in this
application. Fiction is necessarily concrete and definite; it permits of
no open alternatives; its aim of illusion prevents a proper amplitude of
demonstration, and modern prophecy should be, one submits, a branch of
speculation, and should follow with all decorum the scientific method.
The very form of fiction carries with it something of disavowal; indeed,
very much of the Fiction of the Future pretty frankly abandons the
prophetic altogether, and becomes polemical, cautionary, or idealistic,
and a mere footnote and commentary to our present discontents.

[3] It might have been used in the same way in Italy in the first
century, had not the grandiose taste for aqueducts prevailed.

[4] And also into the Cornwall mines, be it noted.

[5] It might be worse. If the biggest horses had been Shetland ponies,
we should be travelling now in railway carriages to hold two each side
at a maximum speed of perhaps twenty miles an hour. There is hardly any
reason, beyond this tradition of the horse, why the railway carriage
should not be even nine or ten feet wide, the width, that is, of the
smallest room in which people can live in comfort, hung on such springs
and wheels as would effectually destroy all vibration, and furnished
with all the equipment of comfortable chambers.

[6] Explosives as a motive power were first attempted by Huyghens and
one or two others in the seventeenth century, and, just as with the
turbine type of apparatus, it was probably the impetus given to the
development of steam by the convenient collocation of coal and water and
the need of an engine, that arrested the advance of this parallel
inquiry until our own time. Explosive engines, in which gas and
petroleum are employed, are now abundant, but for all that we can regard
the explosive engine as still in its experimental stages. So far,
research in explosives has been directed chiefly to the possibilities of
higher and still higher explosives for use in war, the neglect of the
mechanical application of this class of substance being largely due to
the fact, that chemists are not as a rule engineers, nor engineers
chemists. But an easily portable substance, the decomposition of which
would evolve energy, or--what is, from the practical point of view, much
the same thing--an easily portable substance, which could be decomposed
electrically by wind or water power, and which would th