Water transportation within the same period developed from the slow sailing vessel, dependent on the winds and ocean currents to the modern "ocean greyhound" capable of making its way against both ocean current and winds at a speed never realized by the sailing vessel with both wind and ocean currents in its favor. The stormy Atlantic, to cross which in the early years of the century was a tedious and dangerous journey of many weeks, by the close of the 19th century was a matter of five days pleasure trip. All mystery and dread of "old ocean" had disappeared, and men no longer mourned the fate of "those who go down to the sea in ships," since ocean travel is far less dangerous than overland travel, and the oceans so far from being regarded any longer with the old time awe and mystery are now looked upon as merely convenient highways for the commerce of the world. By the speed of ocean travel we may say that all the continents and islands of the globe are married. Running parallel with this development of transportation on land and sea, is what may be called the growth of our instantaneous means of communication. At the opening of the period we are considering the pony express and mail coach were our most rapid means of communication, and looking back to those days such means of communication seem marvellously inadequate to civilized life. At the close of the century, however, by means of ocean cables and telegraph lines, and telephone instrumentalities--to say nothing of the more wonderful wireless telegraphy now coming into use--we are in instant communication with all the great centers of civilization, and each morning may read the world's daily history gathered by these agencies for our instruction. In the same period, in the matter of illumination, we went from the tallow dip and farthing rush light to gas and electricity. From the slow working hand press to the lightning Hoe multicolor printing press, capable of printing, in different colors, folding, pasting and counting from twenty-four thousand to one hundred thousand impressions per hour! Within our period improvements in telescopes have revealed new wonders of the universe. Improvement in microscopes have revealed wonders undreamed of in former times both in organic and inorganic nature. In the laboratories of the world new mysteries of light and heat and other elementary forces of nature were revealed. Substances which aforetime had been regarded as opaque were found in some lights to be transparent. Indeed in all the arts and sciences such progress was made as had not before been made in a period of a thousand years. [22] There seemed to have come an awakening of intellectual power in men, and the whole world was transformed by means of it. Political liberties were enlarged, old tyrannies were rendered for the present and future impossible in many countries, because of the consciousness of inherent power in the people.