history of inventions and discoveries. If there were among us an
intellect sufficiently encyclopedic in knowledge and versatile in
genius, it could take every one of these facts and trace its intricate
lineage of principles and mechanisms, step by step, up to the original
Adam of the first invention and the original Eve of the first necessity.

There is a period between us and these first parents of our present
progress that is strangely obscure. It is a sort of antediluvian age, in
which there were evidently stupendous mechanical powers of some kind,
and an extensive acquaintance with some things. The ruins of Egypt alone
would prove this. But a deluge of oblivion has washed over them, and
left these colossal bones to tell what story they can. The only way to
account for such an extinction is, that they were monstrous contrivances
out of all proportion to their age, spasmodic successes in science,
wonders born out of due time,--deriving no sustenance or support from a
wide and various kindred, and therefore, like the giants which were of
old, dying out with their day.

It is different with what has taken place since. Every work has come in
its right time, just when best prepared for, and most required. There is
not one but is sustained on every side, and fits into its place, as each
new piece of colored stone in a mosaic is sustained by the progressive
picture. Every one is conserved by its connections. Whatever has been
done is sure,--and the past being secure, the future is guarantied.
It is impossible that the present knowledge in the world should be
extinguished. Nothing but a stroke of imbecility upon the race, nothing
but the destruction of its libraries, nothing but the paralysis of
the printing-press, and the annihilation of these means of
intercommunication,--nothing but some such arbitrary intervention
could accomplish it. The facts already in human possession, and the