Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life

[30] birth of an heir to his modest throne. Nay, even while we dwell on these achieved wonders, we are all waiting eagerly for the time when all their apparatus shall be superseded, and laid away in museums of obsolete lumber; and we are all living in expectation of what a day may bring forth. Those of us who in youth saw men still habitually striking a fire with flint and steel may yet live to see nearly every material convenience of life served by absolutely invisible forces. Yes, it is the age of science; beneficent or baleful, saving or slaying, its sway has come.

With this has naturally come a shifting of the old standards of education, and the claim that science, as such, is exclusively to rule the world. An accomplished German savant, long resident in this country, once told me that in his opinion poetry, for instance, was already quite superseded, and music and art must soon follow. Literature, he thought, would only endure, if at all, as a means of preserving the results of science, probably in the shape of chemical formulae. He was a most agreeable man, who always complained that he had made a fatal mistake in his career through rashly taking the whole of the Diptera, or two-winged insects, for his scientific task; whereas to have