It is probable that in the future, as in the past, the greatest discoveries, those which will suddenly reveal totally unknown regions, and open up entirely new horizons, will be made by a few scholars of genius who will carry on their patient labour in solitary meditation, and who, in order to verify their boldest conceptions, will no doubt content themselves with the most simple and least costly experimental apparatus.  Yet for their discoveries to yield their full harvest, for the domain to be systematically worked and desirable results obtained, there will be more and more required the association of willing minds, the solidarity of intelligent scholars, and it will be also necessary for these last to have at their disposal the most delicate as well as the most powerful instruments.  These are conditions paramount at the present day for continuous progress in experimental science.

If, as has already happened, unfortunately, in the history of science, these conditions are not complied with; if the freedoms of the workers are trammelled, their unity disturbed, and if material facilities are too parsimoniously afforded them,—­evolution, at present so rapid, may be retarded, and those retrogressions which, by-the-by, have been known in all evolutions, may occur, although even then hope in the future would not be abolished for ever.

There are no limits to progress, and the field of our investigations has no boundaries.  Evolution will continue with invincible force.  What we to-day call the unknowable, will retreat further and further before science, which will never stay her onward march.  Thus physics will give greater and increasing satisfaction to the mind by furnishing new interpretations of phenomena; but it will accomplish, for the whole of society, more valuable work still, by rendering, by the improvements it suggests, life every day more easy and more agreeable, and by providing mankind with weapons against the hostile forces of Nature.