In those days men will carry a watch, not with a single face, as now, telling only the time of their own region, but a dial-plate subdivided into the disks of a dozen timepieces, announcing at a glance the hour of as many meridian stations on the globe.  It will be the fair type of the man who wears it.  When human skill shall find itself under this necessity, and mechanism shall reach this perfection, then the soul of that man will become also many-disked.  He will be alive with the perpetual consciousness of many zeniths and horizons beside his own, of many nations far different from his own, of many customs, manners, and ideas, which he could not share, but is able to account for and respect.

We can peer as far as this into the future; for what we predict is only a reasonable deduction from certain given circumstances that are nearly around us now.  We do not lay all the stress upon the telegraph, as if to attribute everything to it, but because that invention, and its recent crowning event, are the last great leap which the mind has made, and because in itself, and in its carrying out, it summoned all the previous discoveries and achievements of man to its aid.  It is their last-born child,—­the greater for its many parents.  There is hardly a science, or an art, or an invention, which has not contributed to it, or which is not deriving sustenance or inspiration from it.

This latter fact makes it particularly suggestive.  As it was begotten itself, and is in its turn begetting, so has it been with everything else in the world of progress.  Every scientific or mechanical idea, every species of discovery, has been as naturally born of one or more antecedents of its own kind as men are born of men.  There is a kith and kin among all these extraordinary creatures of the brain.  They have their ancestors and descendants; not one is a Melchizedek, without father, without mother.  Every one is a link in a regular order of generations.  Some became extinct with their age, being superseded or no longer wanted; while others had the power of immense propagation, and produced an innumerable offspring, which have a family likeness to this day.  The law of cause and effect has no better illustration than the history of inventions and discoveries.  If there were among us an intellect sufficiently encyclopedic in knowledge and versatile in genius, it could take every one of these facts and trace its intricate lineage of principles and mechanisms, step by step, up to the original Adam of the first invention and the original Eve of the first necessity.

There is a period between us and these first parents of our present progress that is strangely obscure.  It is a sort of antediluvian age, in which there were evidently stupendous mechanical powers of some kind, and an extensive acquaintance with some things.  The ruins of Egypt alone would prove this.  But a deluge of oblivion has washed over them, and left these colossal bones to tell what story they can.  The only way to account for such an extinction is, that they were monstrous contrivances out of all proportion to their age, spasmodic successes in science, wonders born out of due time,—­deriving no sustenance or support from a wide and various kindred, and therefore, like the giants which were of old, dying out with their day.