The Age of Science: A Newspaper of the Twentieth Century

by Frances Power Cobbe

The greatest discovery ever achieved by man is beyond all question that which it is now our privilege to announce, namely, that of the new Prospective Telegraph. By this truly wonderful invention (exquisitely simple in its machinery, yet of surpassing power) the obstacle of Time is as effectually conquered as that of Space has been for the last generation by the Electric Telegraph; and future years—even, it is anticipated, future centuries—will be made to respond to our call as promptly and completely as do now the uttermost parts of the earth wherewith the magic wire has placed us in communication.

For obvious reasons the particulars of this most marvellous invention, and the name of its author, must be withheld from the public till the patents be made out, and the enormous profits which must accrue from its application be secured to the Company which is invited to undertake to work it (with limited liability). We are only permitted by special favour to hint that the natural Force relied on to set the machinery in action is neither Electric, Magnetic, nor Galvanic; nor yet any combination of these; but that other great correlated imponderable agency, whose existence has been for some time suspected by many intelligent inquirers, called the Psychic Force, whose laws of action it has been reserved for this new and greater Wheatstone to develop and apply to practical utility. That no scepticism may linger in the minds of our readers, we desire to add that we have been gratified by the actual inspection of several short fragments forestalled by this invaluable process from the press of the next fifty, eighty, and one hundred and thirty years respectively; and have at this moment in our hands a complete transcript (the most important document of the series) of a newspaper bearing date January 1st, 1977, photographed in a very beautiful manner by the machine upon an enormous sheet of paper, which was found needful to contain the type in the most compressed form. As the printed matter of this gigantic periodical equals at least in bulk the whole of Gibbon’s History, or Mr. Jowett’s edition of Plato, we cannot attempt to do more than offer our readers a few brief extracts, serving, however, we trust, as not inadequate samples of the literary treasures which are shortly to be revealed to our curiosity, and satisfying even the most incredulous that the invention of which we speak has been crowned with triumphant success. We have only to add that the great originator of this discovery entertains hopes that, by an ingenious inversion of the action of his machine, he may be able to convert it, when required, into a Retrospective Telegraph, bringing back the Past, as it already antedates the Future, and restoring to us all the records of antiquity whose loss we have deplored, as, for example, the Odes of Sappho, the missing Books of Livy, the Prometheus Unbound of Æschylus, and the original MSS. of the Vedas, the Zend Avesta, and the Pentateuch. The final completion of this latter discovery, however, is scarcely perfected, and we shall not therefore pause to describe its probable value, but proceed without further delay to put our readers in possession of all the details for which we can find space concerning the Newspaper of 1977, which has been very sagaciously selected by the inventor as the first fruits of the working of his Prospective Machine.

The name of this journal (which, we conclude, may be considered as the Times of the twentieth century) is

THE AGE OF SCIENCE,

and obviously refers with pride to the consciousness of its readers that they live in a period of the world’s history when Science reigns supreme over human affairs, having achieved unimaginable triumphs, and altogether superseded most of the pursuits of mankind in ruder ages, such as War, the Chase, Literature, Art, and Religion. This appropriate title is printed, we may remark, in the largest and clearest possible Roman type, instead of in the Old English character now commonly used for a similar purpose. No fount, indeed, which we have ever seen employed, save in a few old Italian folio éditions de luxe, has type so large and legible as that in which the whole newspaper is printed, the greatest care apparently being taken to spare the eyes—or perhaps we should say the spectacles—of the readers, since, judging from the opticians’ advertisements of “Spectacles for Infants,” “Spectacles for Elementary Schools by the gross,” and “Cautions to Mothers” against allowing babies to use their eyes, it would appear that unassisted vision had become rare, if not unknown. There are ten columns on each page, each ten times as long as it is broad, and there are a hundred pages in the journal, proving that the decimal system has been thoroughly adopted even in such details. Spread out open, the Age of Science would cover the floor of a very large hall, and we apprehend from certain marks that a convenient method of suspending it on pulleys from the ceiling, must have superseded our clumsy practice of holding our papers with extended arms.

Proceeding to peruse the intensely interesting contents of the Age of Science, we first note that it is written in English differing from our own chiefly by the use of a strange and, to our eyes, barbarous orthography, (intended, we presume, to facilitate elementary education,) and by the introduction of a vast number of technical terms of the class we reserve for scientific treatises, but which are apparently brought into use in everyday parlance. The familiarity of the contributors with all gases, fluids, and substances of chemistry, all the bones of all the beasts, birds, and fishes which live, or ever did live, on this planet, and all the diseases incidental to humanity, speaks volumes for the superiority of their scientific education over our own. At the same time, on two or three occasions when illustrations have been chosen from past History or Poetry, the writers betray that their studies have not been much extended in the direction of Literature. One gentleman thinks that Mr. Gladstone wrote the Iliad on hints afforded by Dr. Schliemann, and that Milton was the author of the Book of Genesis. Another refers to the period when Rome was founded by Romeo and Juliet, while a third mentions the “once celebrated Divina Commedia by Moliere,” and regrets that “so curious a specimen of archaic Japanese art as Titian’s ‘Assumption’ should not have been spared from the pile in which the ‘Transfiguration’ of Phidias and the ‘Last Supper’ of Praxiteles were so judiciously destroyed by order of the Committee of the Royal Academy, to put a stop to the propagation of bad æsthetic taste.” For the intelligence of our readers we shall be compelled to translate the singular phraseology of the Age of Science as nearly as possible into familiar English, and our present spelling; and shall only quote a few of the Leading Articles, touching on specially interesting topics, out of the twenty-five which the vast newspaper publishes as its daily contribution.

The arrangement of the Age of Science is a little different from and more logical than that of our journals. The first page is rationally devoted to Telegraphic Intelligence, which everyone may be supposed to desire first to read. Instead of political news, however, or records of battles, deaths of eminent personages, floods, storms, or fires, these telegrams consist exclusively of minute verbatim reports of the proceedings of above ninety Scientific Congresses, which seem to be taking place at the same time in Europe, Asia, America, Australia, and even in one instance (a Geographical Meeting) in Africa, on the shore of Lake Albert Nyanza. The various sections of the British Association have been obviously long broken up, and again divided and subdivided till separate congresses have been found desirable for each department.

It would occupy more space than the whole of this volume to offer even the briefest condensation of these Reports, as the discussions and papers of the learned members of the different congresses are carried on chiefly in terms quite unintelligible to us, and refer to scientific disputes to which we do not possess a clue. We must pass over these columns of the Age of Science, and proceed to the next department, which is a Report of the Assembly of Convocation—a topic which we were surprised to find possessed such prominent interest, till we discovered that the Convocation of 1977 will consist exclusively of Medical men. The Upper House seems to be formed of Physicians and Surgeons who have obtained titles of Nobility, and take rank according to the dioceses over which they exercise medical supervision, and the Lower House to be a representative body elected by medical graduates throughout the kingdom.

The meetings for the Province of Canterbury take place respectively in Henry the Seventh’s Chapel, and in the nave of Westminster Abbey; Jerusalem Chamber and the Board Room of the Bounty Office having probably proved inconveniently small, and the whole Abbey (as we learn accidentally from a paragraph in another part of the paper) having been “set aside, since the Dissolution of the Churches, for the use of the Medical Profession, and for anatomical and physiological lectures and craniological researches, for which latter purpose the vaults beneath offer peculiarly interesting specimens.”

The Report runs as follows:—