Dr. Fridtjof Nansen
Miss Kingsley
Vast engineering works, of which the Manchester Ship Canal is the most familiar instance, have been carried on. This great waterway, thirty-five miles long, and placing an inland town in touch with the sea, was begun in 1887 and finished in 1894. Numerous exhibitions, at home and abroad, have stimulated industrial and æsthetic progress; and science has continued to advance with bewildering rapidity, developing chiefly in practical directions. The bacteriologist has unveiled much of the mystery of disease, showing that seed-germs produce it; the photographer comes in aid of surgery, for the discovery of the X or Röntgen rays, by the German professor whose name is associated with them, now enables the surgeon to discover foreign bodies lodged within the human frame, and to decide with authority their position and the means of removing them. Burial reforms, in the interests of health and economy, have been introduced, and nursing, elevated into a science, has become an honourable profession for cultured women. In 1894 that eminent savant Lord Rayleigh brought before the British Association his discovery of a hitherto unknown constituent in the atmosphere. The use of steam as a motive power, almost contemporaneous with the Queen's reign, has bound our land in a network of railways: now it is electricity which is being utilised in the same sense, and to the telephone and the telegraph as means of verbal communication is added the motorcar as a means of rapid progression, 1896 seeing its use in streets sanctioned by Parliament. It may not yet supersede the bicycle, which in ten years has greatly increased in favour. Electric lighting, in the same period, has become very general; and further adaptations of this mysterious force to man's service are in the air.
J. M. Barrie
