The great works of the ancients are in the main mere monuments of the patient manual labor of myriads of workers, and can only rank with the buildings of the diatom and coral insect. Not so with modern achievement. The last century has been peculiarly an age of ideas and conservation of energy, materialized in practical embodiment as labor-saving inventions, often the product of a single mind, and partaking of the sacred quality of creation. The old word of creation is, that God breathed into the clay the breath of life. In the new world of invention mind has breathed into matter, and a new and expanding creation unfolds itself. The speculative philosophy of the past is but a too empty consolation for short-lived, busy man, and, seeing with the eye of science the possibilities of matter, he has touched it with the divine breath of thought and made a new world. When the Nineteenth Century registered its advent in history, the world of invention was a babe still in its swaddling clothes, but, with a consciousness of coming power, was beginning to stretch its strong young arms into the tremendous energy of its life. James Watt had invented the steam engine. Eli Whitney had given us the cotton gin. John Gutenberg had made his printing type. Franklin had set up his press. The telescope had suggested the possibilities of ethereal space, the compass was already the mariner’s best friend, and gunpowder had given proof of its deadly agency, but inventive genius was still groping by the light of a tallow candle. Even up to the beginning of this century so strong a hold had superstition on the human mind, that inventions were almost synonymous with the black arts, and the struggling genius had not only to contend with the natural laws and the thousand and one expected difficulties that hedge the path of the inventor, but had also to overcome the far greater obstacles of ignorant fear and bigoted prejudice. A labor-saving machine was looked upon askance as the enemy of the working man, and many an earnest inventor, after years of arduous thought and painstaking labor, saw his cherished model broken up and his hopes forever blasted by the animosity of his fellow men. But with the Nineteenth Century a new era has dawned. The legitimate results of inventions have been realized in larger incomes, shorter hours of labor, and lives so much richer in health, comfort, happiness, and usefulness, that to-day the inventor is a benefactor whom the world delights to honor. So crowded is the busy life of modern civilization with the evidences of his work, that it is impossible to open one’s eyes without seeing it on every hand, woven into the very fabric of daily existence. It is easy to lose sight of the wonderful when once familiar with it, and we usually fail to give the full measure of positive appreciation to the great things of this great age. They burst upon our vision at first like flashing meteors; we marvel at them for a little while, and then we