as out of a bicycle ride or a
game of cricket, will be relegated to the limbo of exploded fallacies.

The race, as a whole, will be athletic in the same sense in which
cultured ladies and gentlemen are at present. It will, a century
hence, offer a still more striking contrast to the existing state of
the Chinese, who bandage their women's feet in order to show that they
are high born and never needed to walk or to exert themselves!--the
assumption being that no one would ever move a muscle unless under
fear of the lash of poverty or of actual hunger. The farther Western
civilisation travels from that effete Eastern ideal, the greater will
be the hope for human progress in physical, mental and moral
well-being.

CHAPTER II.

NATURAL POWER.

"Nature," remarked James Watt when he set to work inventing his
improved steam-engine, "has always a weak side if we can only find it
out." Many invaluable secrets have been successfully explored through
the discovery of Nature's "weak side" since that momentous era in the
industrial history of the world; and the nineteenth century, as Watt
clearly foresaw, has been emphatically the age of steam power. In the
condenser, the high pressure cylinder and the automatic cut-off, which
utilises the expansive power of steam vapour, mankind now possesses
the means of taming a monster whose capacities were almost entirely
unknown to the ancients, and of bringing it into ready and willing
service for the accomplishment of useful work. Vaguely and loosely it
is often asserted that the age of steam is now giving place to that of
electricity; but these two cannot yet be logically placed in
opposition to one another. No method has yet been discovered whereby
the heat of a furnace can be directly converted into an electric
current. The steam-engine or, as Watt and his predecessors called it,
the "fire-engine" is _par excellence_ the world's prime motor; and by
far the greater proportion of the electrical energy that is generated
to-day owes its existence primarily to the steam-engine and to other
forms of reciprocating machinery designed to utilise the expansive
power of vapours or gases acting in a similar manner to steam.

The industrial revolutions of the coming century will, without doubt,
be brought about very largely through the utilisation of Nature's
waste energy in the service of mankind. Waterfalls, after being very
la