GREAT FACTS.

THE PROGRESS OF INVENTION.

The inventive faculty of man tends more directly than any other intellectual power he possesses to raise him in the scale of creation above the brutes. Nearly every advance he makes beyond the exercise of his natural instincts is caused by invention—by that power of the mind which combines known properties in different ways to obtain new results.

When an Indian clothes himself with the skins of animals, and when he collects the dried leaves of the forest for his bed, he is either an original inventor, or he is profiting by the inventions of others. Those simple contrivances—the first steps in the progress of invention—are succeeded by the more labored efforts of inventive genius, such as contriving means of shelter from rain, or from the heat of the sun, when caves cannot be found to creep into, or the overhanging foliage fails to afford sufficient covering. The construction of places of shelter is an imitation of the protection formed by Nature; and the rudest hut and the most magnificent palaces have their prototypes in caverns and in the interlacing branches of trees.

Nature also supplies knowledge of the means by which inventors are enabled to work. The savage who seizes hold of a broken bough is in possession of the lever, the uses of which he learns by the facility it affords in moving other objects. He ascends to the top of a precipice by walking up the sloping hill behind, and he thus becomes practically acquainted with the principle of the inclined plane. The elements of all the mechanical powers are then at his command, to be applied by degrees in administering to his wants, as his inventive faculties, guided by observation and experience, suggest. An accidental kick against a loose stone shows the action of propulsive force; and the stone that he has struck with his foot, he learns to throw with his hand. The bending of the boughs of trees to and fro by the wind teaches the action of springs; and in the course of time the bow is bent by a strip of hide, and the relaxation of the spring, after farther bending, propels the arrow. Observation and imitation thus lead to invention, and every new invention forms the foundation of further progress.

It has been so with every invention at present known, and must so continue to the end of time:—"There is nothing new under the sun." Gas lighting, Steam locomotion, and the Electric Telegraph have each sprung from some source "old as the hills," though so modified by gradually progressive changes, that the giant we now see bears no resemblance to the infant of ages past.

The observation that light particles floating in the air are attracted by amber when rubbed, which was made known six centuries before the Christian era, was the origin of the invention by which communications are now transmitted, with the rapidity of lightning, from one part of the world to another. There is no apparent relation between effects so dissimilar; yet the steps of progress can be distinctly traced, from the attraction of a feather to the development of the electric telegraph.

Whenever the history of an invention can be thus tracked backward to its source, it will be found to have advanced to its present state by progressive steps, each additional advance having been dependent on the help given by the progress before made. Sometimes these onward movements are greater and more remarkable than others, and the persons who made them have become distinguished for their inventive genius, and are considered the benefactors of mankind; yet they were but the followers of those who had gone before and shown the way.

Many of the most remarkable inventions are attributable to accidents noted by observing and inventive minds. Not unfrequently also have important discoveries of truth been made in endeavouring to establish error; and new light is being constantly thrown on the path of invention by unsuccessful experiments.

This view of the means by which inventions originate and are brought to perfection may appear to detract from the merit of inventors, since it regards them as founding their conceptions altogether on the works of others, or on chance. But instead of diminishing their claims to approbation and reward, it places those claims on a more substantial foundation than that of abstract original ideas. The man who has the faculty to perceive that by a different application of