It has given us the best fruits of science in permanent possession. The study of science invariably aids, in a thousand ways, the progress of mankind. It gives us new conceptions of nature and of the possibilities of art; it promotes right ways of work and of study; it teaches the inventor and the discoverer how most surely and promptly to gain their several ends, it gives the world the results of all acquired knowledge in concrete form. This one instance which we are now especially interested in contemplating has performed more wonderful miracles than ever Aladdin's genii attempted. One man, with a steam engine at his hand, turns the wheels of a great mill, drives forty thousand spindles, applies a thousand horse power to daily work in the spinning of threads, the weaving of cloth, the impulsion of a steamboat, or the drawing of great masses of hot iron into finest wire. This puny creature, his mind in his finger tips, exerts the power of ten thousand men, working with muscle alone, and, aided by a handful of women, boys and girls, clothes a city. A half dozen men in the engine room of an ocean steamer, with a hundred strong laborers in the boiler room and on deck, transports colonies and makes new nations, brings separated peoples together, unites countries on opposite sides of the globe, brings about easy exchanges between pole and equator. One man on the footboard of the locomotive, one man shoveling into the furnaces the black powder that incloses the energy stored in early geological ages, a half dozen men mounted on the long train of following vehicles, combine to bring to the mill girl in Massachusetts, the miner in Pennsylvania, the sewing woman, and the wealthy merchant, her neighbor in New York, the flour made in Minnesota from the grain harvested a few weeks earlier in Dakota. All the world is served faithfully and efficiently by this unimaginable power, this product of the brain of the inventor, protected by the law, stimulated and aided by the capital that it has itself almost alone produced. And thus have the inventors of the steam engine set in motion and placed at the disposal of mankind for every form of useful work all the great forces of nature; thus Hero of Alexandria touched the then concealed spring which called all the genii of earth, fire, water and air to do the bidding of the race. Thus Papin, Worcester, Newcomen, Watt, and Corliss and others of our own contemporaries, have applied the genii to their task of leveling mountains, traversing seas, continents, and the depths of the earth, building ships, locomotives, hamlets and cities, cottages and palaces, turning the spindle, operating the loom, and setting motion and giving energy to every machine, doing the work of thousands of millions of men, converting barbarism into civilization, giving necessaries of life in profusion, comforts in plenty, and luxuries in superabundance.