Morning journal and courier., 1886-06-26
The Changes of Half a Century.

LOliver Wendell Holmes in Atlantic.l
 After an interval of more than 50 years. propose taking a second look at some parts of Europe. This will give my readers of the Atlantic, as well as the writer, a vaca- tion to which we both seem entitled. It is a Rip Van Wrinkle experiment which I am promising myself. The changes wrought by half century in the countries I visited amount almost to transformation. I left the England of William the Fourth of the Duke of Wellington, of Sir Robert Peel; the France of Louis Philippe, of Marshal Sault, of Thiers, of Guizot. I went from Man chester to Liverpool by the new railroad, the only one I saw in Europe. I looked upon England from the box of stage coach, upon France from the coupe of diligence, upon Italy from the chariot of vetturinO. The broken windows Of Apsley house were still boarded up when I 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 I remember it. I did not see it erected; it must have been a sensa- tion to have looked on, the engineer standing underneath, so as to be crushed by 1t if it disgraced him by failing in the process. As for the dynasties which have overlaid each other like Dr. Settlements Trojan cit ies, there is need of moralizng over a history which instead of Finis IS constantly ending with What nexta
 With regaid to the changes in the gen. eraI conditions of society and the advance in human knowledge, think for one moment what 50 years have done. I have often imagined myself escorting some wise man of the past to our Saturday club, where we Often have distinguished strangers as our guests. Suppose there sat by mel will ,nt Si1. for hn has too long away from us, but that other great man, whom Prof. Tyndall names as next to him in intellectual stature, as he passes along the line of master minds of the coun- try from the days of Newton to our own pr. Thomas Young, who died in 1929. Would he or I be the listener, if We were side by sides However humble might feel in such a presence, I should be so clad in the grandeur of the new discoveries, inven- tions, ideas I had to impart to him that should seem to myself like the ambassador of an emperor. I should tell him of the ocean steamers, railroads that spread them selves like cobwebs over the civilized and half-civilized portions of the earth, the tele- graph and the telephone, the photograph and the spectroscope. I should hand him a paper with the morning news from London to read by the electric light, I should startle him with a. friction match, should amaze him with the incredible truths about ansesthe- SIa, sHou1u dstOAlSu uln WItu Gue ItloE conclusions of geology, I should electrify him by the fully developed doctrine of the correlation of forces, I should delight him with the cell-doctrine, should confound him with the revolutionary apocalypse of Darwin ism. All this change in the aspects, posi- tion, beliefs of humanity since the time of Dr. Young's death, the date of my own grad uation from college
 1 ought to consider myself highly favored to have lived through such a half century. But it seems to me that in walking the streets of London and Par1s shall revert to my student days, and appear to myself like a relic of a former generation. Those who have been born into the inheritance of the new civilization feel very differently about it from those who have lived their way into it. To the young and those approaching middle age all those innovations in life and thought are as natural, as much a matter of course, as the air they breathe; they form part of the framework of their intelligence, of the skeleton about which thesr mental life is or ganized. To men and women of more than threeseore they are external accretions like the shell of mollusk, the iointed plates of an articulate.