CATACLYSMAL CHANGES.
PA.INF1IL experience continued for many years has com- pelled the British public to doubt whether anything will over again raise the price of silver. That is the only way in which we can explain the entire failure of the announce- ment in the Daily Chronicle of Monday to affect the price of that much-discredited metal. It was announced on that day in a leaded paragraph, condensed apparently from New York telegrams, that a Mr. Emmens, of New York, had discovered a process by which silver could be changed into gold at an estimated cost of 2°_ an ounce ; that seventeen ingots of gold had been thus produced, and that for one of them the 'United States Assay Office in New York, after careful testing, had paid £19 is. Sd. It was added, with an attention to detail which showed that the author of the story possessed much of the talent of a novelist, that pure silver being necessary for the operation, Mr. Emmens had found Mexican dollars the moss suitable silver coins to be used in his experiments. The story was, we imagine, a practical joke intended to test the credulity of the public ; but we rather wonder that the public showed itself so irresponsive. It is not many years since a story nearly as wild about Mr. Edison and the electric light sent down gas shares all over Europe with a run ; and we hardly know, except on the theory just stated, why the present legend should have been so coldly rejected by all bullion brokers. For anything anybody knows, except some geologist with a notion of chemistry, silver may be gold in an inchoate stage ; and if it is, why should not some scientific man discover " five processes " for hurrying it on a bit ? It is, at all events, more likely that silver should become gold than that lead should, and for hundreds of years Europeans, many of them men of proved ability, believed in the possibility of that transformation, which, in faot, required nothing except a powder, the secret of which was known to all Rosicrucians and a good many other people, some clever impostors included. (They knew, it would seem, that if gold is placed upon lead, and both subjected to strong heat, the gold fuses itself with the lead in such a way that the amalgam is indistinguishable by the eye from a mass of gold, and as they trusted their eyes, and were greedy of cash, they were pleasantly taken in.) The market, however, in the present case was obstinately in- credulous, the price of silver did not even rise by the regular sixteenth which indicates that somebody is exporting ingots, and if the authors of the legend betted among themselves as to its effect, the one who betted on the rise must have lost his money.
Seriously, we ar- not quite sure that if rough silver were dealt in by the community, instead of by a limited number of experts, the market would have remained so profoundly tranquil. There is a credulity abroad as to the possible results of scientific investigation which has gone very deep into men's minds, and has, moreover, sunk down into strata of society where ignorance, if not unfathomable, is at least very profound. That readiness to believe the incredible which used to be displayed towards wizards or any others who pretended to supernatural power, now displays itself towards savants, and we should be very sorry to indicate the discovery which, if Lord Kelvin affirmed that he bad made it, the majority of the public would at once reject. We suppose if he affirmed something opposed to common-sense, if he said, for instance, that he could turn an ounce of lead into a pound of silver, that the statement would be received with decorous smiles, and would not set men c,alcalating the value of their pennies; but we are not quite sure even of that. The ancient certainty that, science or no science, you cannot get more hay out of a field than there is grass in it, seems to have been temporarily suspended,—thousands of fairly educated people believing that you may one day produce force without expending or consuming anything ; and the reliance upon experience seems to have disappeared altogether. Only the highest experts trust that any more, when told of some gigantic advance in knowledge which to-morrow, or next day at furthest, is to bring forth to add to the resources or establish the wellbeing of mankind. If Sir John Lawes declared, through the Times, that he had discovered a way of producing ten ears of wheat on one stalk, and that his process would take less from the earth than the old one, the old farmer who granted disbelief—at least as to the second statement—would be considered a fool, and probably inter- viewed by some clever young townsman anxious to describe so " splendid and typical a representative of old fogeydom." The fact that there never has been in the whole history of the world an invention or a discovery of the cataclysmal kind- one, that is, which suddenly and finally altered the whole position of man—no philosopher's stone, no elixir of life, nothing which gave us the power of looking five minutes forward, is wholly disregarded ; and if we said, as we should be quite prepared to say, that such a circum- stance suggested that in the providential government of the world man was intended to advance slowly, we should be told that we remained too far behind the times to be allowexl to say any more. Yet if anything is clear, that is clear- The greatest discovery that man has made—the use of fire— must have taken ages to spread through humanity, for man. kind was then in the savage state, and down to our own time
there have been tribes who were wholly ignorant, like the Tasmanians, of that most wonderful increase to human knowledge. The first man who planted a seed, expecting it to grow, was almost certainly denounced as an idiot; and there are tribes to this day which do not believe that any- thing of the sort will happen. The next greatest discovery, the strange property of the loadstone, the cause of which, despite the advance of science, no savant can do more than guess at, was not diffused as a certainty for generations, and when it was, hardly gave the mariner confidence to go out of sight of shore. The most cataclysmal of all inventions—that of gunpowder (which, by the way, was probably invented twice, for Greek fire must have been the same thing, used with an . imperfect knowledge of its propelling power)—and the one which most affected the organisation of society by destroying the value of armour and equalising the power of men of different sizes, took a generation to spread abroad, and when it did spread hardly affected the relative strength of the nations. If such an invention were discovered now the papers would ring with prophecies, probably of a German or British conquest of the world, which would not happen a bit the faster for all the "appreciations." Printing was a grand dia. covery, and though it did not help the Chinese much, did help Europeans a great deal ; but it did not help them suddenly, and for the immense majority of mankind it might just as well never have occurred. Steam is a grand discovery, but it has not upset the world, it has been utilised only by degrees, and, like printing, the mass of mankind know very little about it, one-third of the human race, indeed, denouncing it still as something which " haazes and maazes the blessed fe,alds." The discovery of the way to harness lightning, which excites the imagination even of poets, is one of the greatest man has made ; but it has upset nothing except newspaper arrangements, and beyond enabling nations to talk together as individuals do, it has produced no con- sequences. It is, we suppose, possible that somebody may discover a way of destroying a fleet from a balloon, and thus deprive the richest nation of its maritime advantages ; but a mode of counteracting that discovery would probably be found at the same time, and the balance of maritime power would remain unchanged. There never can be an elixir of life, because all men are sentenced to capital punishment, but a preparation which would destroy or neutralise all hostile bacteria, germs, spores, or whatever they call the injurious atoms, is, at all events, conceivable ; but it would be years before it greatly influenced the per- manent health even of races bright enough to believe in the physicians' opinions. Remember the savage opposition to vaccination in the teeth of evidence really as strong as that which demonstrates any arithmetical proposition.
From all that what deduction ? Simply this ; that the readiness to take alarm, which is one mainspring of modern credulity, is not justified, either by experience or theory, and that men should receive all announcements of cataclysmal discovery or invention with a willingness to inquire, and a quiet conviction that if false they do not matter, and if true they will affect things very slowly, and will de- velop countervailing and restraining influences. According to science a meteorite big enough to shatter the world might strike it, and bring even Labour troubles or the German Emperor's experiments to an end ; but the universe is governed by powers before which even science is very ignorant, and judging from all experience the meteorite will either be shattered in time or just miss us in its course through space. Anything may happen to the individual, because nothing can happen to him which after a few more minutes will be of importance, but the race would seem at least to be sedulously protected. There is no reason that
anybody can think of why all the children for the nest twenty years should not be girls or boys ; but they will be born pretty equal for all that. A family may display an hereditary tendency in that way, which, if it lasted, would destroy it; but no nationality has ever betrayed it, or will ever be destroyed by that swiftly operating cause.
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