As books preserve thought through time, so the
telegraph and the telephone transmit it through the space they
annihilate, and therefore minds are swayed one by another without
regard to the limitations of space and time which formerly forced each
community to work in comparative isolation. It is the same with the
body as with the brain. The machinery of the factory and the farm
enormously multiplies bodily skill and vigor. Countless trained
intelligences are at work to teach us how to avoid or counteract the
effects of waste. Of course some of the agents in the modern
scientific development of natural resources deal with resources of
such a kind that their development means their destruction, so that
exploitation on a grand scale means an intense rapidity of development
purchased at the cost of a speedy exhaustion. The enormous and
constantly increasing output of coal and iron necessarily means the
approach of the day when our children's children, or their children's
children, shall dwell in an ironless age--and, later on, in an age
without coal--and will have to try to invent or develop new sources
for the production of heat and use of energy. But as regards many
another natural resource, scientific civilization teaches us how to
preserve it through use.
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