than one fourth the amount used twenty years ago. It may be that the engines of Watt and Stephenson will yield in their turn to more economical motors; still, they have already expanded the wealth, resources, and even the territories of England, more than all the battles fought by her soldiers or all the treaties negotiated by her diplomatists.
The coal which has hitherto been the chief source of power probably represents the product of five or six million years during which the sun shone upon the plants of the carboniferous period, and stored up its energy in this convenient form. But we are using this conserved force wastefully and prodigally, for, although horse-power in steam-engines has so largely increased since 1864, two men only now produce what three men did at that date. It is only three hundred years since we became a manufacturing country. According to Professor Dewar, in loss than two hundred years more the coal of this country will be wholly exhausted, and in half that time will be difficult to procure. Our not very distant descendants will have to face the problem, What will be the condition of England without coal? The answer to that question depends upon the intellectual development of the nation at that time. The value of the intellectual factor of production is continually increasing, while the values of raw material and fuel are lessening factors. It may be that, when the dreaded time of exhausted fuel has arrived, its importation from other coalfields, such as those of New South Wales, will be so easy and cheap that the increased technical education of our operatives may largely overbalance the disadvantages of increased cost in fuel; but this supposes that future governments in England will have more enlightened views as to the value of science than past governments have possessed.
Industrial applications are but the overflowings of science welling over from the fullness of its measure. Few would ask now, as was constantly done a few years ago, "What is the use of an abstract discovery in science?" Faraday once answered this question by another, "What is the use of a baby?" Yet round that baby center all the hopes and sentiments of its parents, and even the interests of the state, which interferes in its upbringing so as to insure it being a capable citizen. The processes of mind which produce a discovery or an invention are rarely associated in the same person, for, while the discoverer seeks to explain causes and the relations of phenomena, the inventor aims at producing new effects, or at least of obtaining them in a novel and efficient way. In this the inventor may sometimes succeed without much knowledge of science, though his labors are infinitely more productive when he understands the causes of the effects which he desires to produce.
A nation in its industrial progress, when the competition of the world is keen, can not stand still. Three conditions only are possible for it. It may go forward, retrograde, or perish. Its extinction as a great nation follows its neglect of higher education, for, as described
