Another thousand years passed
when it taught some other intelligent man to use it as a pump,
supply-pipe, sieve, or reservoir for collecting electricity,
still without knowing how it worked or what it was. For a
historian, the story of Faraday's experiments and the invention
of the dynamo passed belief; it revealed a condition of human
ignorance and helplessness before the commonest forces, such as
his mind refused to credit. He could not conceive but that some
one, somewhere, could tell him all about the magnet, if one could
but find the book -- although he had been forced to admit the
same helplessness in the face of gravitation, phosphorescence,
and odors; and he could imagine no reason why society should
treat radium as revolutionary in science when every infant, for
ages past, had seen the magnet doing what radium did; for surely
the kind of radiation mattered nothing compared with the energy
that radiated and the matter supplied for radiation. He dared not
venture into the complexities of chemistry, or microbes, so long
as this child's toy offered complexities that befogged his mind
beyond X-rays, and turned the atom into an endless variety of
pumps endlessly pumping an endless variety of ethers. He wanted
to ask Mme. Curie to invent a motor attachable to her salt of
radium, and pump its forces through it, as Faraday did with a
magnet.
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