In 1856
an article appeared in Harper's Magazine depicting some
anticipated features of life in A.D. 3000. We have since made
great advances, but they bear little resemblance to what the
writer imagined. He did not dream of the telephone, but did
describe much that has not yet come to pass and probably never
will.
The fact is that, much as the nineteenth century has done, its
last work was to amuse itself by setting forth more problems for
this century to solve than it has ever itself succeeded in
mastering. We should not be far wrong in saying that to-day there
are more riddles in the universe than there were before men knew
that it contained anything more than the objects they could see.
So far as mere material progress is concerned, it may be doubtful
whether anything so epoch-making as the steam-engine or the
telegraph is held in store for us by the future. But in the field
of purely scientific discovery we are finding a crowd of things of
which our philosophy did not dream even ten years ago.
The greatest riddles which the nineteenth century has bequeathed
to us relate to subjects so widely separated as the structure of
the universe and the structure of atoms of matter. We see more and
more of these structures, and we see more and more of unity
everywhere, and yet new facts difficult of explanation are being
added more rapidly than old facts are being explained.
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