rm apparatus, so that he
could go through the rocks prospecting very much as an earthworm goes
through the soil, excavating in front and dumping behind, but, to put it
moderately, there are considerable difficulties. And I doubt the
imaginative effect. On the whole, I think material science has got
samples now of all its crops at this level, and that what lies before it
in the coming years is chiefly to work them out in detail and realise
them on the larger scale. No doubt science will still yield all sorts
of big surprising effects, but nothing, I think, to equal the dramatic
novelty, the demonstration of man having got to something altogether new
and strange, of Montgolfier, or the Wright Brothers, of Columbus, or the
Polar conquest. There remains, of course, the tapping of atomic energy,
but I give two hundred years yet before that....

So far, then, as mechanical science goes I am inclined to think the
coming period will be, from the point of view of the common man, almost
without sensational interest. There will be an immense amount of
enrichment and filling-in, but of the sort that does not get prominently
into the daily papers. At every point there will be economies and
simplifications of method, discoveries of new artificial substances with
new capabilities, and of new methods of utilising power. There will be a
progressive change in the apparatus and quality of human life--the sort
of alteration of the percentages that causes no intellectual shock.
Electric heating, for example, will become practicable in our houses,
and then cheaper, and at last so cheap and good that nobody will burn
coal any more. Little electric contrivances will dispense with menial
service in more and more directions. The builder will introduce new,
more convenient, healthier and prettier substances, and the young
architect will become increasingly the intelligent student of novelty.
The steam engine, the coal yard, and the tail chimney, and indeed all
chimneys, will vanish quietly from our urban landscape. The speeding up
and cheapening of travel, and the increase in its swiftness and comfort
will go on steadily--widening experience. A more systematic and
understanding social science will be estimating the probable growth and
movement of population, and planning town and country on lines that
would seem to-day almost inconceivably wise and generous. All this means
a quiet broadening and aeration and beautifying of life. Utopian
requireme