SCIENCE AND PRACTICAL LIFE.
It is somewhat remarkable that at a time when science is indubitably failing to justify the exalted hopes of those who looked to it for a solution of the deepest questions of being, it is enlarging our sense of its value to practical every-day life. The mystery of the molecule is insoluble, but the usefulness of chemistry is rapidly increasing. Professor W. Mattieu Williams proposes to use maltose as a cooking agent to produce foods which are both more palatable and more easily digested. Those who attend the cooking school at Chautauqua this summer will probably learn how this work is to be done, and what results will follow. The theory sprang out of attempts to feed cattle on malted grain. It was found to be too expensive for cattle, and also hardly necessary, because cows have good digestive apparatus. Human beings have impaired digestion, and can afford more expensive food than the beasts have need of. The maltose cooking carries graniverous foods up into an advanced stage of nutritive condition, lessens the labor of weak stomachs, and tickles dull palates with new flavors. There is no near limit to the possible fruits of this thought. The chemist may render us incalculable services along this line. We have suffered something from the chemistry of men who adulterate our food; it is a comfort to know that the good uses of chemistry are coming forward to render us most valuable compensations.
It is a matter of course that in this field we shall often be disappointed; but so many solid gains are secured that we shall readily excuse some fanciful experiments. In lighting public streets and buildings, electricity has made it possible to turn night into day; chemical studies have perfected the grinding of flour; a hundred more of small and great practical advances in scientific living are secure. We shall go on. It is very noticeable that the conveniences of modern life have triumphed in unexpected ways over natural difficulties. The zone of comfort for human life has been widened toward the pole and toward the equator. The gains are more slowly harvested southward; any reader who feels the languor of this season will know why we do not march so triumphantly toward the equator as we do toward the north pole. Moral energy is in larger demand, as we go south, to resist the tendency to idleness. The north wind puts spurs into us and whips us into action. We shall therefore find the northward limit of vigorous life before we find the south boundary of it. And naturally our science, invention and discovery bear upon cold rather than heat. We have the means now of living in higher latitudes, in full moral and mental activity, than were good for body or brain a hundred years ago. We know how to build for warmth in zero weather, and we have cheap fuel and cheap light for the frosts and the dark of the North.
An enthusiastic writer says that natural gas is to be the fuel of the immediate future—the next fuel. We have as yet found it only here and there on the earth; but we are not done searching for it. Imagine, then, that we have found this gas all round the shores of Hudson’s Bay, and calculate the consequences. A new Mediterranean is opened in a region which has always been reckoned uninhabitable. Poets and philosophers flourish far up toward Doctor Warren’s original Eden! For what but a cheap and abundant fuel and light is needed to make possible a large and flourishing empire around Hudson’s Bay? Migration, which is said to move on parallel lines, has been trending northward for twenty-five years. The wheat fields of America are a hundred and fifty miles nearer the pole than they were fifty years ago. The Dakota and British Northwest which we were willing to leave to the Indians fifty years ago, are eagerly coveted for the plow of the wheat farmer. We are undeniably moving north; the limit of that movement will be fixed for us by devices, discoveries, sciences, which will enlarge our fields toward the eternal ice—on principles similar to those which have already extended our domain in that direction. For several generations the silk grown in Lombardy has been packed on the backs of horses or in carts and transported across the Alps to be spun and woven in Switzerland. Why should not our cotton travel by sea to the shores of Hudson’s Bay to be spun and woven? Give them power, heat and light in one natural agent, and the people of the American Mediterranean might excel in any industry. And in default of natural gas, who will now dare to say that the chemist may not solve the problem in a more intellectual way than by the use of the drill? We write here only of a possible expansion of the human domain by the services of science.
A more practicable matter is that the age of steam, out of which, into something better, we are probably to pass at a day not distant, has been a very prodigal one. Waste is its great fault. It wastes three fourths of the coal it consumes; it therefore wastes infinite sums of human energy. It wastes everything, nature and man, the streams, the forests, the vitality and the hopes of men. Its motto is concentration. It herds human beings in towns; it makes transit laborious and long. The age of economies has begun, and new agents, such as electricity and gas, have for their mottoes disperse and distribute. It is probably not extravagant to say that mankind are wasting every week enough of natural bounties to sustain them for a month, perhaps for a year. If science, then, shall only barely help us to the economic use of all natural bounties, it will have enriched human life (for the mass of mankind) at least four-fold. It will probably be well for us if this enrichment comes gradually and is preceded by a moral preparation for the use of abundance. We have never, as a race, been good enough to be safely rich. We have no poets from the equatorial regions. It may be many generations before we are good enough to grow philosophy and high bred cattle in the torrid zone. Perhaps we do not any where keep up in moral training with the march of science.
THE COURSE OF READING FOR 1885-86.
The student about to enter college has scarcely a pleasanter task than that of examining the course he is about to begin. The prospect of future achievements, how fascinating it is! That Livy which he has heard discussed by learned seniors and professors will soon be his property, too. The problems that are historical among his big brothers and cousins, and sisters as well, sometimes, he will soon grapple with. Whole fields of unknown literature and science and art open to him in his brief glance. He enjoys familiarizing himself with the names of the authors of the text-books, in marking among the elective studies his choice, in looking up the old text-books in the library, in preparing note-books for the next year, in picking up random bits of information. Getting ready for his college course often becomes quite as engrossing as the actual work. The C. L. S. C. student will experience this same interest in looking over what he is going to do another year. The course is now ready, and he will have the entire summer for contemplating his coming conquests. Enjoy the prospect to the full; it is certainly a goodly one. The bone and sinew of next year’s course is to be Roman History and Literature. The place Greece and its men filled in the course of 1884-85 will be taken by Rome. While the subject is equally interesting, the course of the coming year has one great advantage. Greece has no modern history of particular importance, its heroes died with Corinth’s destruction, its literature and art and philosophy faded with its loss of patriotism. Where Rome stood, now Italy stands. The history of the decadence of Roman rule and the growth of Italian freedom is one of the most thrilling chapters in the world’s history. A literature, an art, and a science belong to this new growth. In studying Rome’s life we have a modern chapter that keeps up our interest. The course happily provides for us papers on “Modern Italy” and “Italian Biography,” in addition to the works on the History of Rome, the “Preparatory Latin Course in English,” the “College Latin Course in English,” and “A Day in Ancient Rome.” A practical turn is given to the work by a study of the relations of Rome to modern history.