"The example is before you. Without any of your crude and cumbersome machinery, the mountain is being terraced and fitted for the abode of man, the elemental constituents are being disintegrated, properly disposed, rearranged and the surface recombined in a new form and proportion by natural laws, and remote generations will find yonder landway as our workmen will leave it. They could level the mountain as readily as they terrace it, distributing it over the adjacent plain, leaving it a level and fertile glebe, instead of a towering height of rock and sand overspread with soil. "All that you see or will see is the result of knowledge and wisdom turned to noble and unselfish ends for the common betterment and elevation of the race. "Your progenitors learned to dig the hard and soft ores from the earth and produce iron, then took a step forward and converted it into steel, of greater strength and durability, capable of light forms and high polish, and there you have stopped at the very beginning. You are incapable of saving your own handiwork from disintegration. The elements corrode your finest steel products, and they flake away to the original conditions of the crude ore, losing a large proportion of their original virtues and constituents. We have, on the contrary, gone forward to the ultimate. "You have denuded your lands of forests to use as a cumbersome material for building, and furniture and other purposes, the wood, which decays and is soon destroyed. You have, without understanding the process, macerated and reduced woods to a pulp and fashioned it into paper, which in several forms you utilize, but you have stopped at the beginning of the journey. "We have carried it forward, and a large proportion of the material used in the construction of our houses and furniture and bridges and cars are the product of our forests in a new and better and more enduring form--light and capable of the most graceful fashioning. This is used in combination with the metals in all departments of our economies." I had already noticed the fact that but little of the woodwork was in the natural form, and that while it was incredulously light, it was incredibly strong. The same was true of the wrought metals, all of which differed from our own forms. In my examinations of the bridges across streams, both large and small, I noted the fact that they were constructed in about equal parts of wood, or a substance I took therefor, and metal, differing greatly from the metals we use, yet not wholly unlike them. Both materials were of tubular construction, appearing almost fragile in their lightness, but strong and firm, and showing none of the ravages of time and the elements. So far as I was able to judge no paints were used, but everything was perfectly polished. The bridges were light, airy constructions, swung from lofty and graceful piers, a span of a thousand feet appearing to be as firm and strong as one of fifty.