It is somewhat remarkable that at a time when science is indubitably
failing to justify the exalted hopes of those who looked to it for a
solution of the deepest questions of being, it is enlarging our sense
of its value to practical every-day life. The mystery of the molecule
is insoluble, but the usefulness of chemistry is rapidly increasing.
Professor W. Mattieu Williams proposes to use maltose as a cooking agent
to produce foods which are both more palatable and more easily digested.
Those who attend the cooking school at Chautauqua this summer will
probably learn how this work is to be done, and what results will follow.
The theory sprang out of attempts to feed cattle on malted grain. It was
found to be too expensive for cattle, and also hardly necessary, because
cows have good digestive apparatus. Human beings have impaired digestion,
and can afford more expensive food than the beasts have need of. The
maltose cooking carries graniverous foods up into an advanced stage of
nutritive condition, lessens the labor of weak stomachs, and tickles
dull palates with new flavors. There is no near limit to the possible
fruits of this thought. The chemist may render us incalculable services
along this line. We have suffered something from the chemistry of men
who adulterate our food; it is a comfort to know that the good uses of
chemistry are coming forward to render us most valuable compensations.
It is a matter of course that in this field we shall often be
disappointed; but so many solid gains are secured that we shall readily
excuse some fanciful experiments. In lighting public streets and
buildings, electricity has made it possible to turn night into day;
chemical studies have perfected the grinding of flour; a hundred more of
small and great practical advances in scientific living are secure. We
shall go on. It is very noticeable that the conveniences of modern life
have triumphed in unexpected ways over natural difficulties. The zone
of comfort for human life has been widened toward the pole and toward
the equator. The gains are more slowly harvested southward; any reader
who feels the languor of this season will know why we do not march so
triumphantly toward the equator as we do toward the north pole. Moral
energy is in larger demand, as we go south, to resist the tendency to
idleness. The north wind puts spurs into us and whips us into action.
We shall therefore find the northward limit of vigorous life before we
find the south boundary of it. And naturally our science, invention and
discovery bear upon cold rather than heat. We have the means now of
living in higher latitudes, in full moral and mental activity, than were
good for body or brain a hundred years ago. We know how to build for
warmth in zero weather, and we have cheap fuel and cheap light for the
frosts and the dark of the North.
An enthusiastic writer says that natural gas is to be the fuel of the
immediate future—the next fuel. We have as yet found it only here and
there on the earth; but we are not done searching for it. Imagine, then,
that we have found this gas all round the shores of Hudson’s Bay, and
calculate the consequences. A new Mediterranean is opened in a region
which has always been reckoned uninhabitable. Poets and philosophers
flourish far up toward Doctor Warren’s original Eden! For what but a
cheap and abundant fuel and light is needed to make possible a large and
flourishing empire around Hudson’s Bay? Migration, which is said to move
on parallel lines, has been trending northward for twenty-five years. The
wheat fields of America are a hundred and fifty miles nearer the pole
than they were fifty years ago. The Dakota and British Northwest which
we were willing to leave to the Indians fifty years ago, are eagerly
coveted for the plow of the wheat farmer. We are undeniably moving north;
the limit of that movement will be fixed for us by devices, discoveries,
sciences, which will enlarge our fields toward the eternal ice—on
principles similar to those which have already extended our domain in
that direction. For several generations the silk grown in Lombardy has
been packed on the backs of horses or in carts and transported across
the Alps to be spun and woven in Switzerland. Why should not our cotton
travel by sea to the shores of Hudson’s Bay to be spun and woven? Give
them power, heat and light in one natural agent, and the people of the
American Mediterranean might excel in any industry. And in default of
natural gas, who will now dare to say that the chemist may not solve the
problem in a more intellectual way than by the use of the drill? We write
here only of a _possible_ expansion of the human domain by the services
of science.
A more practicable matter is that the age of steam, out of which, into
something better, we are probably to pass at a day not distant, has been
a very prodigal one. Waste is its great fault. It wastes three fourths
of the coal it consumes; it therefore wastes infinite sums of human
energy. It wastes everything, nature and man, the streams, the forests,
the vitality and the hopes of men. Its motto is _concentration_. It
herds human beings in towns; it makes transit laborious and long. The
age of economies has begun, and new agents, such as electricity and gas,
have for their mottoes _disperse_ and _distribute_. It is probably not
extravagant to say that mankind are wasting every week enough of natural
bounties to sustain them for a month, perhaps for a year. If science,
then, shall only barely help us to the economic use of all natural
bounties, it will have enriched human life (for the mass of mankind)
at least four-fold. It will probably be well for us if this enrichment
comes gradually and is preceded by a moral preparation for the use of
abundance. We have never, as a race, been good enough to be safely rich.
We have no poets from the equatorial regions. It may be many generations
before we are good enough to grow philosophy and high bred cattle in the
torrid zone. Perhaps we do not any where keep up in moral training with
the march of science.