The Arizona sentinel., 1886-07-31
A HALF CENTURY.
Changes Wrought in Fifty Years Amount
 ing Almost to Transformation.

Changes Wrought in Fifty Years Amount ing Almost to a Transformation.
 After an interval of more than fifty years propose taking second look at some parts of Europe. This will give my readers, as well as the writer, a vacation to which we both seem en- titled. It is Rip Van Wrinkle experi- ment which I am promising myself. The changes wrought by half century in the countries visited amount almost to transformation. 1 left the England of William the Fourth, of the Duke of Wellington, of Sir Robert Peel; the France of Louis Philippe, of Marshal Soult, of Thiers, of GrljzOt. l went from Manchester to Liverpool by the new railroad, the only one | saw in Europe. looked upon EnglalNd from the box of a stage-coach, upon France from the coupe of diligence, Npon Italy from the chariot of a vetturluo, The broken windows of Apsley House were still boarded up when 1 was in London. The asphalt pavement was not laid in Paris. The Obelisk of Luxor was lying in its great boat in the Seine, as 1 remember it. l did not see it erect cd; it must have been a sensation to have looked on, the engineer standing underneath, so as to be crushed by it if it disgraced him by falling in the pro- cess. As for the dynasties that have overlaid each other like Dr. Schlie- mann's Trojan cities, there is no need of moralizing over a history which in- stead of FIniS is constantly ending with What Eert?
 With regard 10 the changes in the general conditions of society and the advance in human knowledge, think for one moment what fifty years has done. l have often imagened myself eScOrting some wise man of the East to our Saturday Club, where we often have distinguished strangers as our guests
 Suppose there sat by mel will not say Sir Isaac Newton, for he has been too long away from us, but that other great man, whom Prof. Tyndall names a. next to him in intellectual stature, as he passes along the line of master minds of h's country from the days of Newton to our Own-Dr. Thomas Young, who died in 1929. Would he or be the listener, if we were side by side? However humble 1 might feel in such presence, 1 should be so clad in the grandeur of the new discoveries, in- vent ons, ideas, had to impart to him that 1 should seem to myself like the Anl assador of an Emperor. 1 should tc Il m of the ocean steamers, the rail roads that spread themselves like cob webs over the civilized and half-civil- izcd portions of the earth, the telegraph and the telephone, the photograph and the spectrOscope. 1 should haud him paper with the morning news from Lon don to read by the electric light, l should startle him with a friction match, 1 should amaze him with the incredible i truths about an2sthesia, 1 should aston 1 ish him with the later conclusions of ge- ology, should electrify him by the fully developed doctrine of the correlation of forces, I should delight h'm with the cell-doctrine, I should confound him with the revolutionary apocalypse of Darwinism. All this change in the as- poets, position, beliefs of humanity since the tune of Dr. Young's death, the date 1f my own graduation from college
 l ought to consider myself highly fla vorcd to have lived through such a half : century. But it seems to me that in walking the streets of London and Paris l shall revert to my student days, and appear to myself like a relic of a former | generation. Those who b.-ge been born i into the inheritance of tfl4new civiliza- ] on feel very differently about it from those who have lived their way into it. To the young and those approaching middle age all these innovations in life and thought are as natural, as much a ' matter of course as the air they