Freeland tribune. (Freeland, Pa.) 1888-1921, 1901-04-15
THE TEN MASTER MINDS.
THESE MEN HAV: BEEN PROMINENT
IN TIE WORLDS PROGRESS.

ies-lhe Great " ork OF IA Delicate Boy.
If the nineteenth century has been
married by progress in any single di-
rection it is emphatically that of
science. Standing now at its very
close glance at the personalities Who
did most toward the shaping of this
tendency and the molding of mems
minds is timely. There have been
great men in other departments Of
human endeaVor-great writer's, great
statesmen, artists and musicians cut
it is by its scientific achievements
that the century Will be marked out
from all preceding centuries. No less
a man than Alfred Russell Wallace
has pointed out that the scientific
achievements Of the last hundred years
have hoen greater in extent and num-
ber than those CT all previous CEN
turies combined. And it has been not
only in theoretical, hut practical,
science as well that most has been
accomplished. In the lifting Of the
burden of labor by machinery, the
speedy transit of men and goods and
tHc dlleNltIlOll VI EullluH sun Jnlb
has been the century of centuries.
This has been the age Of steam. One
of the Eathflnders in this direction was
James Watt 1736-1S91.) The delicate
boy who could not play the rough
games of his fellows was to startle the
world by his discovery that water, so
long considered one of the elementary
substances was really made up of two
gases-oXygen and hydrogen. But he
did not stop here. He invented the
condenser of the steam engine, and
the closed cylinder, which has made
the locomotive possible, opening the
way to all the progress which the rail-
way has brought with it. In 1863 he
constructed the first steam engine that
would work satisfactorily. 1t was he
who suggested the metric system,
which has been adopted all over Eu-
rope.
Next to steam it is electricity that
has done most for the advancement of
the race during this century, and fore
most among the original minds that
solved the preliminary problems max
ing advancement possible was Michael
Faraday Q791-1SG7). He may well be
called the first electrician, for his dis
covery Of the principles of voltaic and
magnetic induction laid the basis of
the science of applied electricity. Be-
fore his time scientists knew that
there was a force which they agreed
to call electricity. but what could be
done with it remained to be proved by
Faraday's experiments. That cleo
tricity was possessed of a chemical
quality had not even been suspected
Until his experiments in what has
since been known as electrolysis.
John Ericsson (1S03-1SS9) was
competitor of Stephenson in the trial
of locomotives in 1929, but his work
was to be connected more with the de-
velopment of locomotion by water
than On land. By the time he was 10
years old his inventive genius had
commenced to work, but it was only
after his coming to the United States
in 1893 that his most famous work
was done. He had previously invented
the hot air engine which has been so
well utilized in our modern gas ma
chimes. but he will live longest in the
memory of men as the inventor of the
screw propeller for ships. The first
vessel to which he applied this original
device was the Princeton in 1913. His
place in history will be always CON
nected also with his conception of the
Monitor which played so great a part
in the naval engagement in Hampton
Roads. TIL type or vessel modelled
after this first example is called a
monitor even now. In the later years
of his life Ericsson devoted his in
ventive genius to the perfecting OF tor
pedces and torpedo boats.
Natural science has progressed mar
vellously in these hundred years and
it is to the mind of George Cuvier
Q7G9-1S32) that much of it is due
What Linnaeus had done in the previ-
Csis century toward the classification
of animals was now put upon scien-
tific basis. Cuvier established the his
tory Of the animal kingdom in the
light OF comparative anatomy, and
laid the foundations of the study of
prehistoric animal life by his wonder
full restorations of extinct species from
single fragments. 1t is a common
place now to speak of the age of the
mammoth or the plesiosaurus. Cuvier
was the first to grasp the fact that our
age is only the latest in long series
of geologic ages.
The natural successor of Cuvier,
profiting by his researches and at the
same time bringing to bear new theo-
ry by which he explained the rela-
tionshp between the different species
in the animal kingdom was Charles
Darwin 1S09-1SS2). 1t seems strange
to us that it is less than so years since
the publication of the "Origin of
Species" in which the principle of evo-
luton was laid down explicitly for the
first time, for it has been so generally =
accepted that it is as familiar almost
as our A, B, Cs. Others had dimly per-
ceived something of the universal