and stood for a time watching the dark river and turning ever and again
to the lit buildings and bridges. His mind began to scheme conceivable
replacements of all those clustering arrangements. . . .

'It has begun,' he writes in the diary in which these things are
recorded. 'It is not for me to reach out to consequences I cannot
foresee. I am a part, not a whole; I am a little instrument in the
armoury of Change. If I were to burn all these papers, before a score of
years had passed, some other man would be doing this. . .

Section 3

Holsten, before he died, was destined to see atomic energy dominating
every other source of power, but for some years yet a vast network of
difficulties in detail and application kept the new discovery from any
effective invasion of ordinary life. The path from the laboratory to the
workshop is sometimes a tortuous one; electro-magnetic radiations
were known and demonstrated for twenty years before Marconi made them
practically available, and in the same way it was twenty years before
induced radio-activity could be brought to practical utilisation. The
thing, of course, was discussed very much, more perhaps at the time of
its discovery than during the interval of technical adaptation, but with
very little realisation of the huge economic revolution that impended.
What chiefly impressed the journalists of 1933 was the production of
gold from bismuth and the realisation albeit upon unprofitable lines of
the alchemist's dreams; there was a considerable amount of discussion
and expectation in that more intelligent section of the educated
publics of the various civilised countries which followed scientific
development; but for the most part the world went about its business--as
the inhabitants of those Swiss villages which live under the perpetual