t invention, and its recent
crowning event, are the last great leap which the mind has made, and
because in itself, and in its carrying out, it summoned all the previous
discoveries and achievements of man to its aid. It is their last-born
child,--the greater for its many parents. There is hardly a science, or
an art, or an invention, which has not contributed to it, or which is
not deriving sustenance or inspiration from it.

This latter fact makes it particularly suggestive. As it was begotten
itself, and is in its turn begetting, so has it been with everything
else in the world of progress. Every scientific or mechanical idea,
every species of discovery, has been as naturally born of one or more
antecedents of its own kind as men are born of men. There is a kith and
kin among all these extraordinary creatures of the brain. They have
their ancestors and descendants; not one is a Melchizedek, without
father, without mother. Every one is a link in a regular order of
generations. Some became extinct with their age, being superseded or no
longer wanted; while others had the power of immense propagation, and
produced an innumerable offspring, which have a family likeness to this
day. The law of cause and effect has no better illustration than the
history of inventions and discoveries. If there were among us an
intellect sufficiently encyclopedic in knowledge and versatile in
genius, it could take every one of these facts and trace its intricate
lineage of principles and mechanisms, step by step, up to the original
Adam of the first invention and the original Eve of the first necessity.

There is a period between us and these first parents of our present
progress that is strangely obscure. It is a sort of antediluvian age, in
which there were evidently stupendous mechanical powers of some kind,
and an extensive acquaintance with some things. The ruins of Egypt alone
would prove this. But a deluge of oblivion has washed over them, and
left these colossal bones to tell what story they can. The only way to
account for such an extinction is, that they were monstrous contrivances
out of all proportion to their age, spasmodic successes in science,
wonders born out of due time,--deriving no sustenance or support from a
wide and various kindred, and therefore, like the giants which were of
old, dying out with their day.

It is different with what has taken place since. Every work has come in
its right time, just when best prepare