in the judgment of mankind about the method
of the coming of new things. People imagine that new things come all
at once, but they do not. Nothing comes all at once; that is, no
thing. In the facts of the natural world, that is, among visible
phenomena of the landscape, the judgment of people is soon corrected.
There it is seen that everything grows. The growth is sometimes slow
and sometimes rapid; but everything comes gradually out of its
antecedents. No tree or shrub or flower ever came immediately. No
living creature on the face of the earth begins by instantaneous
apparition. The chick gets out of its shell presently, but even that
takes time. Every living thing comes on by degrees from a germ, and
the germ is generally microscopic! Nature is, indeed, a marvel!

The facts of human life, whether tangible or intangible, have this
same method. For example, there has not been an invention known to
mankind that has not come on in the manner of growth. The antecedents
of it work on and on in a tentative way, producing first this trial
result and then that, always approaching the true thing; and even the
true thing when it comes is not perfect. It is made perfect afterward.
There was never an instantaneous invention, and there was never a
complete one! It is doubtful whether there is at the present time a
single complete, that is perfect or perfected, invention in the world.
They are all of partial development. They show in their history their
origin, their growth, their gradual approximation to the perfect form.

All of the marvelous contrivances which, fill the arena of our
civilization, making it first vital and then vocal, have come by the
evolutionary process. Every one of them has a history which is more
and more obscure as we follow it backward to its source. In every
case, however, there comes a time when a given discovery, manifesting
itself in a given invention, takes a sort of spectacular character,
and it is then rather suddenly revealed to the consciousness of
mankind.

Of this general law the telegraph affords a conspicuous example. The
whole world knows the story of the telegraph of Morse. It was in 1844
that the work of this great inventor was publicly demonstrated to the
world. Then it was that the electro-magnetic telegraph in its first
rude estate began to be used in the transmission of messages and other
written information.

It has come to pass that "telegraph" means virtually _electric_
telegra