, taken together, were destined to change
the entire aspect of European civilization. The inventions were
gunpowder, the mariner's compass, paper and the printing-press, three of
which appear to have been brought into Europe by the Moors, whether or
not they originated in the remote East. The scientific discovery which
must be coupled with these inventions was the Copernican demonstration
that the sun and not the earth is the centre of our planetary system.
The generations of men that found themselves (1) confronted with the
revolutionary conception of the universe given by the Copernican theory;
(2) supplied with the new means of warfare provided by gunpowder; (3)
equipped with an undreamed-of guide across the waters of the earth; and
(4) enabled to promulgate knowledge with unexampled speed and cheapness
through the aid of paper and printing-press--such generations of men
might well be said to have entered upon a new ethnic period. The
transition in their mode of thought and in their methods of practical
life was as great as can be supposed to have resulted, in an early
generation, from the introduction of iron, or in a yet earlier from the
invention of the bow and arrow. So the Europeans of about the 15th
century of the Christian era may be said to have entered upon the Second
or Middle Status of civilization.

Steam machinery.

The new period was destined to be a brief one. It had compassed only
about four hundred years when, towards the close of the 18th century,
James Watt gave to the world the perfected steam-engine. Almost
contemporaneously Arkwright and Hargreaves developed revolutionary
processes of spinning and weaving by machinery. Meantime James Hutton
and William Smith and their successors on the one hand, and Erasmus
Darwin, Francois Lamarck, and (a half-century later) Charles Darwin on
the other, turned men's ideas topsy-turvy by demonstrating that the
world as the abiding-place of animals and man is enormously old, and
that man himself instead of deteriorating from a single perfect pair six
thousand years removed, has ascended from bestiality through a slow
process of evolution extending over hundreds of centuries. The
revolution in practical life and in the mental life of our race that
followed these inventions and this new presentation of truth probably
exceeded in suddenness and in its far-reaching effects the metamorphosis
effected at any previous transition from one ethnic period to another.