Finally, with important and fruitful mechanical ideas which the world did not have twenty years ago, with machinery which no one could have believed possible one hundred years ago, and which has, since that time, quintupled the power of every free laborer in Christendom, we are going to make man what his Creator designed him to be,--always and everywhere a sub-creator. By the press we are making the knowledge of the past the knowledge of the present, the knowledge of one the knowledge of all. By the telegraph the senses of sight and hearing are to be extended around the globe. If we do not make ships to navigate the air, for ourselves, our wives, and our little ones, it will not be because we cannot, but because, being lords of land and sea, with power to traverse either with all desirable speed, we are too wise to waste force either in beating the air for buoyancy, battling with gravity like birds, on the one hand, or in paddling huge balloons against the wind, on the other. The steam-driven wheel leaves us no occasion to envy even that ubiquitous denizen of the universe, the flying-fish. We have in it the most economical means of self-transportation, as well as of mechanical production. It only remains to make the most of it. This, to be sure, will not be achieved without infinite labor and innumerable failures. The mechanical genius of the race is like the polypus anxiously stretching its tentacles in every direction, and though frustrated thousands of times, it grasps something at last.