Washington did not do this as fully as he wished, but his ambition has been and is being realized through the medium of hundreds of enterprises under both national and private encouragement. The result of a trip made in the fall of 1784 was the real historic beginning of the Potomac enterprise. On his return he wrote to Benjamin Harrison, Governor of Virginia, “I shall take the liberty now, my dear sir, to suggest a matter which would mark your administration as an important era in the annals of this country if it should be recommended by you and adopted by the Assembly.” He reached far out for those days, assuming Detroit as a point of departure for the trade of the northwest territory. His confidence in the practical abilities of the American people is shown by the remark, “A people who are possessed with the spirit of commerce, who see and will pursue their destinies, may achieve almost anything. No person who knows the temper, genius and policy of this people as well as I do can harbor the smallest doubt.”
In urging the Potomac scheme, he later asked that commissioners be appointed to make a careful survey of the Potomac and James rivers to their respective sources, and that a complete map of the country intervening between the seaboard, the Ohio waters and the Great Lakes be presented to the people. “These things being done,” he says, “I shall be mistaken if prejudice does not yield to facts, jealousy to candor and finally, if reason and nature, thus aided, do not dictate what is right and proper to be done.”
He introduced his plan to the notice of Congress, thus making the first suggestion to that body of the policy of national improvements which the present generation is carrying on, as well as of the policy of exploration and national surveys to which our Government so firmly adheres. To-day the Government is carrying forward surveying work by means of the largest and most thoroughly equipped organizations in existence, and thus is Washington honored.
The scientific men of to-day owe to Washington profound respect and gratitude for the scientific spirit he cultivated in his work. The Government once established on so high a plane, it necessarily followed that all true science should be encouraged and be enlisted in the development of the citizen and of the material resources of the nation.
Charles D. Walcott,
U. S. Geological Survey,
Washington, D. C.
SCIENCE AND FICTION.
The leading article of the June number of the Century Magazine is entitled “The Problem of increasing Human Energy,” and is written by Nikola Tesla. Mr. Tesla offers the reader some naive verbal analogies between the causes of human progress and the ‘energy’ of theoretical physics, and a eulogy of a number of inventions which he expects to make. He intersperses these with sundry remarkable statements such as, “our own earth will be a lump of ice;” “Though this movement is not of a translatory character, yet the general laws of mechanical movement are applicable to it;” “That we can send a message to a planet is certain, that we can get an answer is probable;” “It is highly probable that if there are intelligent beings on Mars they have long ago realized this very idea [the transmission of electrical energy for industrial purposes without wires], which would explain the changes on its surface noted by astronomers.” (The italics are our own.)
Mr. Tesla’s doctrine of human energy is in some ways as original as the inventions and discoveries which he expects to make. Each of us is, he says, a part of a unitary whole, ‘man.’ “This one human being lives on and on.... Therein ... is to be found the partial explanation of many of those marvelous phenomena of heredity which are the result of countless centuries of feeble but persistent influence.” Now we may “assume that human energy is measured by half the product of man’s mass with the square of a certain hypothetical velocity ... the great problem of science is, and always will be, to increase the energy thus defined.... This mass is impelled in one direction by a force F, which is resisted by another partly frictional and partly negative force R, acting in a direction exactly opposite, and retarding the movement of the mass.”
Unhappily Mr. Tesla in his enthusiasm to progress to recommendations of religion, vegetarianism, the old régime for women and the artificial preparation of nitrogen compounds, neglects to state which direction is the proper one for the human mass to follow, north, south, east, west, toward the moon or Sirius or to Dante’s Satan in the centre of the earth. Nor does he explain how ‘enlightenment’ makes the mass of human bodies go in an exactly opposite direction to that toward which ‘visionariness’ impels them, nor reveal why, if his account be true, he and a ‘visionary’ can walk in the same direction. Of course the whole notion that the ‘velocity’ of the human ‘mass,’ i.e. the space it traverses in a given time, has any connection with human progress or is of any value to anybody or anything, is absurd.
Mr. Tesla has enjoyed considerable, excellent repute as a gifted student of certain electrical phenomena and one expects a good deal from his “electrical experiments, now first published.” Mr. Tesla, too, expects a good deal from them. It would take too long to even note here all the important scientific discoveries which Mr. Tesla expects to make or all the benefits which he expects to thereby confer upon mankind in general and in particular upon those who exploit his inventions. Some samples may be given. War will be rendered harmless by being reduced to a sort of game between ‘telautaumata,’ machines which behave “just like a blind-folded person obeying instructions received through the ear,” any one of which is “enabled to move and to perform all its operations with reason and intelligence.”