have been planted for nought. A man's age is the age in which he does his work rather than that in which he struggles to years of maturity. Moore and Byron were poets of the nineteenth century, although the one had attained to manhood and the other had grown from poverty to inherit a peerage before the new century dawned.

The prophetic rôle—although proverbially an unsafe one—is nevertheless one which every business man must play almost every day of his life. The merchant, the manufacturer, the publisher, the director, the manager, and even the artist, must perforce stake some portion of his success in life upon the chance of his forecast as to the success of a particular speculation, article of manufacture, or artistic conception, and its prospects of proving as attractive or remunerative as he has expected it to be. The successful business man no doubt makes his plans, as far as may be practicable, upon the system indicated by the humorist, who advises people never to prophesy unless they happen to know, but the nature of his knowledge is almost always to some extent removed from certainty. He may spend much time in laborious searching; make many inquiries from persons whom he believes to be competent to advise him; diligently study the conditions upon which the problem before him depends—in short, he may take every reasonable precaution against the chances of failure, yet, in spite of all, he must necessarily incur risks. And so it is with regard to the task of forecasting the trend of industrial improvement. All who are called upon to lay their plans for a number of years beforehand must necessarily be deeply interested in the problems relating to the various directions which the course of that improvement may possibly take. Meanwhile their estimates of the future, although based upon an intimate knowledge of the past and aided by naturally clear powers of insight, must be hypothetical and conditional. Unfortunately for the vast majority of manufacturing experts, the thoroughness with which they have mastered the details of one particular branch of industry too often blinds them to the chances of change arising from localities beyond their own restricted fields of vision.

The merriment occasioned by the first proposals for affixing pneumatic tyres to bicycles may be cited as a striking instance of the lack of forecasting insight displayed by very many of those who are best entitled to pronounce opinions on the minutiae of their particular avocations. In almost every "bike" shop and factory throughout the United Kingdom and America, the suggestion of putting an air-filled hosepipe around each wheel of the machine to act as a tyre was received with shouts of ridicule!

Railway men, who understood the wonderful elasticity imparted by air to pieces of mechanism, such as the pneumatic brake, were not by any means so much inclined to laughter; but naturally, for the most part, they deferred to the rule which enjoins every man to stick to his trade. The rule in question—when applied to the task of estimating the worth of inventions claiming to produce revolutionary effects in any industry—is necessarily, in the majority of cases, more or less irrelevant, because such an invention should be regarded not so much as a proposed innovation in an old trade as the creation of a new one.

George Stephenson's ideas on the transport of passengers and goods were almost unanimously condemned by the experts of his day who were engaged in that line of business. On points relating to wheels of waggons and the harness of horses, the opinions of these men were probably worth something; but in relation to steam locomotives, carriages and trucks running upon rails, their judgment was not merely worthless, but a good deal worse; it was indeed actually misleading, because based on a pretence of knowledge of a trade which was to be called into existence to compete with their own. "Great is Diana of the Ephesians" said the artificers of old; and on the strength of their expert knowledge in the making of idols they set themselves up as judges of systems of theology and morality. The argument, although based on self-interest subjectively, was nevertheless intended to carry weight even among persons who wished to judge the questions in dispute according to their merits, and most of the latter were only too ready to accept the implied dictum that men who work about a temple must be experts in theology! The principles upon which Royal Commissions and Select Committees are sometimes appointed and entrusted with the onerous duty of deciding upon far-reaching industrial problems, affecting the progress of trade and manufactures in the present day, involve exactly the same kind of fallacy. Men are selected to pronounce judgment upon the proposals of their rivals in trade, and narrow-minded specialists to give their opinions upon projects which essentially belong to the border lands between two or more branches of industry, and cannot be understood by persons not possessing a knowledge of both.

Yet the world's work goes on apace; and as capital is accumulated and seeks to find new outlets the multiplication of industrial projects must continue in spite of every discouragement. This process will go on at a rate even faster than that which was exhibited at the beginning of the nineteenth century; but in watching the course of advancement, the world must take count of ideas rather than of the names of those who may have claims to rank as the originators of ideas. While for purposes of convenience, history labels certain great inventive movements, each with the name of one pre-eminent individual who has contributed largely to its success, nothing like a due appraisement of the services rendered by other men is ever attempted. It is not even as if the commanding general should by public acclamation receive all the applause for a successful campaign to the exclusion of his lieutenants. The pioneers in each great department of invention have generally acted as forerunners of the men whose names have become the most famous. They have borne much of the heat and burden of the day, while their successors have reaped the fruits of triumph. Mr. Herbert Spencer's strong protest against the part assigned by some writers in the mental and industrial evolution of the human race to the influence of great men is certainly fully justified, if the attribute of greatness is to be ascribed only to those whose names figure in current histories. The parts performed by others, whose fate it may have been to have fallen into comparatively unfavourable environments, may have entitled them even more eminently to the acclamation of greatness.

The world in such a matter asks, reasonably enough under the circumstances, Shall we omit to honour any of the great men who have played important parts in an industrial movement, assigning as our motive the difficulty of enumerating so many names? For the encouragement of those to whom the ambition for fame acts as a great stimulus to self-devotion in the interests of human progress, it is unavoidable that some men should be singled out and made heroes, while the much more numerous class of those who have also done great work, but who have not been quite so successful, must pass out of the ken of all, excepting the few who possess an expert knowledge of the various subjects which they have taken in hand.

Still the distortion to which history has been subjected through its biographical mode of treatment must always be reckoned with as a factor of possible error by any one attempting to read the riddle of the past, and it may offer a still more dangerous snare to one who tries to deduce the future course of events from the