The same propensity makes a public ready to try new devices, and to adopt them promptly as soon as they prove useful. "Yankee notions" is a slang name that was once applied to all sorts of curious and novel trifles in a peddler's stock. But to-day there are a hundred Yankee notions without the use of which the world's work would go on much more slowly. The cotton-gin takes the seeds from seven thousand pounds of cotton in just the same time that a hand picker formerly needed to clean a pound and a half. An American harvesting-machine rolls through a wheat-field, mowing, threshing, and winnowing the wheat, and packing it in bags, faster than a score of hands could do the work. The steamboat, the sewing-machine, the electric telegraph, the type-writer, the telephone, the incandescent light,--these are some of the things with which American ingenuity and energy have been busy for the increase of man's efficiency and power in the world of matter. The mysterious force or fluid which Franklin first drew quietly to the earth with his little kite and his silken cord has been put to a score of tasks which Franklin never dreamed of. And in the problem of aerial navigation, which is now so much in the air everywhere, it looks as if American inventors might be the first to reach a practical solution. I do not say that this indicates greatness. I say only that it shows the presence in the Spirit of America of a highly developed will-power, strong, active, restless, directed with intensity to practical affairs. The American inventor is not necessarily, nor primarily, a man who is out after money. He is hunting a different kind of game, and one which interests him far more deeply: a triumph over nature, a conquest of time or space, the training of a wild force, or the discovery of a new one. He likes money, of course. Most men do. But the thing that he most loves is to take a trick in man's long game with the obstinacy of matter. Edison is a typical American in this. He has made money, to be sure; but very little in comparison with what other men have made out of his inventions. And what he gains by one experiment he is always ready to spend on another, to risk in a new adventure. His real reward lies in the sense of winning a little victory over this secretive world, of taking another step in the subjugation of things to the will of man. There is probably no country where new inventions, labour-saving devices, improved machinery, are as readily welcomed and as quickly taken up as in America. The farmer wants the newest plough, the best reaper and mower. His wife must have a sewing-machine of the latest model; his daughter a pianola; his son an electric runabout or a motor-cycle. The factories are always throwing out old machinery and putting in new. The junk-heap is enormous. The waste looks frightful; and so it would be, if it were not directed to a purpose which in the end makes it a saving.