The new year of 1903 was inaugurated by the scientific success of the most remarkable, the most marvellous achievement of any age,--that of wireless telegraphy. "Before you write 1903 I will have demonstrated the success of wireless communication," exclaimed Marconi, early in 1902; and ten days before the dawning of the year he named, the achievement was an undisputed success. It is so marvellous a thing that thought, without visible mechanism, can be flashed through the air, across the ocean, and record itself, that the success of Marconi can be held as nothing less than sublime. It is the most impressive of all the realizations of the past decade in entering on the unseen and intangible potencies. It has become a familiar thing to see the cars in city streets, and carriages move swiftly by a motor power that is invisible to the eye; a power that no one can analyze or detect save in its effects and its results. It has become so familiar a thing that one can carry on a conversation with a friend at a thousand miles' distance, that one forgets how wonderful it really is. Within the memory of men still living is the time when it required forty days to make the voyage to Europe, and to obtain, or to send, news between the two countries. Now, within forty minutes, the news is flashed under the ocean. All these discoveries that annihilate Time and Space are simply the result of the evolution of life to higher stages; of the advance of man into the ethereal realm. For is not the underlying and fundamental truth this: that all is spirit? One may talk of "the spiritual life," but there is no other life! Withdraw the spiritual element, and there is no life at all! The difference, then, between the physical and the material worlds is only a difference of degree,--as ice-water, steam, and vapor are only different degrees and conditions of the same element. Progress is the transformation of the physical into the spiritual; of the lower and cruder and denser life into the finer, the more potent, the more ethereal. Energy is proportioned in potency to its ethereal aspects. In its cruder and denser form there is only a low degree of potency, and in its more ethereal forms is there higher potency. The ox-team is a dense and crude form of potency, and the electric motor is the more ethereal and intense form of energy. Now the progress of humanity is unfailingly registered by its advance into the employment of the ethereal forces and the more intense energies, as these form conditions that react upon life. How far more intelligent a nation may be when its facilities for swift intercommunication foster and stimulate and instantly disseminate the knowledge of all events, discoveries, and experiences; and when its facilities for swift transportation facilitate all economic and social intercourse! Judged, then, by their unfailing measurements, how significant was the triumphal achievement of wireless telegraphy on the eve of the dawn of 1903.