[CONTENTS.]

PAGE
The Progress of Invention[1]
Steam Navigation[6]
Steam Carriages and Railways[32]
The Air Engine[60]
Photography[67]
Dissolving Views[86]
The Kaleidoscope[92]
The Magic Disc[98]
The Diorama[103]
The Stereoscope[112]
The Electric Telegraph[124]
Electro-Magnetic Clocks[172]
Electro-Metallurgy[179]
Gas Lighting[188]
The Electric Light[209]
Instantaneous Lights[214]
Paper Making Machinery[221]
Printing Machines[230]
Lithography[249]
Aerated Waters[258]
Revolvers and Minié Rifles[266]
Centrifugal Pumps[275]
Tubular Bridges[282]
Self-acting Engines, including the Nasmyth Steam Hammer[295]

GREAT FACTS.

[THE PROGRESS OF INVENTION.]

The inventive faculty of man tends more directly than any other intellectual power he possesses to raise him in the scale of creation above the brutes. Nearly every advance he makes beyond the exercise of his natural instincts is caused by invention—by that power of the mind which combines known properties in different ways to obtain new results.

When an Indian clothes himself with the skins of animals, and when he collects the dried leaves of the forest for his bed, he is either an original inventor, or he is profiting by the inventions of others. Those simple contrivances—the first steps in the progress of invention—are succeeded by the more labored efforts of inventive genius, such as contriving means of shelter from rain, or from the heat of the sun, when caves cannot be found to creep into, or the overhanging foliage fails to afford sufficient covering. The construction of places of shelter is an imitation of the protection formed by Nature; and the rudest hut and the most magnificent palaces have their prototypes in caverns and in the interlacing branches of trees.