less. The only further fact demanding notice, is, that we
here see still more clearly the truth before pointed out, that in
proportion as the area on which any force expends itself becomes
heterogeneous, the results are in a yet higher degree multiplied in
number and kind. While among the simple tribes to whom it was first
known, caoutchouc caused but few changes, among ourselves the changes
have been so many and varied that the history of them occupies a
volume.[5] Upon the small, homogeneous community inhabiting one of the
Hebrides, the electric telegraph would produce, were it used, scarcely
any results; but in England the results it produces are multitudinous.
The comparatively simple organization under which our ancestors lived
five centuries ago, could have undergone but few modifications from an
event like the recent one at Canton; but now, the legislative decision
respecting it sets up many hundreds of complex modifications, each of
which will be the parent of numerous future ones.

Space permitting, we could willingly have pursued the argument in
relation to all the subtler results of civilization. As before we showed
that the law of progress to which the organic and inorganic worlds
conform, is also conformed to by Language, the plastic arts, Music, &c.;
so might we here show that the cause which we have hitherto found to
determine progress holds in these cases also. Instances might be given
proving how, in Science, an advance of one division presently advances
other divisions--how Astronomy has been immensely forwarded by
discoveries in Optics, while other optical discoveries have initiated
Microscopic Anatomy, and greatly aided the growth of Physiology--how
Chemistry has indirectly increased our knowledge of Electricity,
Magnetism, Biology, Geology--how Electricity has reacted on Chemistry
and Magnetism, and has developed our views of Light and Heat. In
Literature the same truth might be exhibited in the manifold effects of
the primitive mystery-play, as originating the modern drama, which has
variously branched; or in the still multiplying forms of periodical
literature which have descended from the first newspaper, and which have
severally acted and reacted on other forms of literature and on each
other. The influence which a new school of Painting--as that of the
pre-Raphaelites--exercises upon other schools; the hints which all kinds
of pictorial art are deriving from Photography; the complex results of