progress in the arts. They also must have means to compel Nature to reveal her secrets, Æneas succeeded in his great enterprise by plucking a golden branch from the tree of science. Armed with this even dread Charon dared not refuse a passage across the Styx; and the gate of the Elysian fields was unbarred when he hung the branch on its portal. Then new aspects of Nature were revealed:
"Another sun and stars they know
That shine like ours, but shine below."
It is by carrying such a golden branch from the tree of science that inventors are able to advance the arts. In illustration of how slowly at first and how rapidly afterward science and its applications arise, I will take only two out of thousands of examples which lie ready to my hand. One of the most familiar instances is air, for that surely should have been soon understood if man's unaided senses are sufficient for knowledge. Air has been under the notice of mankind ever since the first man drew his first breath. It meets him at every turn; it fans him with gentle breezes, and it buffets him with storms. And yet it is certain that this familiar object—air—is very imperfectly understood up to the present time. We now know by recent researches that air can be liquefied by pressure and cold; but as a child still looks upon air as nothing, so did man in his early state. A vessel filled with air was deemed to be empty. But man, as soon as he began to speculate, felt the importance of air, and deemed it to be a soul of the world upon which the respiration of man and the godlike quality of fire depended. Yet a really intelligent conception of these two essential conditions to man's existence, respiration and combustion, was not formed till about a century ago (1775). No doubt long before that time there had been abundant speculations regarding air. Anaximenes, five hundred and forty-eight years before Christ, and Diogenes of Apollonia, a century later, studied the properties of air so far as their senses would allow them; so, in fact, did Aristotle. Actual scientific experiments were made on air about the year 1100 by a remarkable Saracen, Alhazen, who ascertained important truths which enabled Galileo, Torricelli, Otto de Guericke, and others at a later period, to discover laws leading to important practical applications. Still there was no intelligent conception as to the composition of air until Priestley in 1774 repeated, with the light of science, an empirical observation which Eck de Sulbach had made three hundred years before upon the union of mercury with an ingredient of air, and the decomposition of this compound by heat. This experiment now proved that the active element in air is oxygen. From that date our knowledge, derived from an intelligent questioning of air by direct experiments, has gone on by leaps and bounds. The air, which mainly consists of nitrogen and oxygen, is now known to contain carbonic acid, ammonia, nitric acid, ozone, besides hosts of living organisms which have a vast influ-
