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Ladies and Gentlemen:--
A course of technical instruction now forms one of the most important departments of education in all civilized countries. The law, medicine and the clergy are no longer the only learned professions, for during the century which is about to close the natural sciences of steam-engineering and electiricity have been born, and chemistry, phoenix-like, has arisen from the ashes of its half-mythical, half-real progenitor--alchemy.
Each, in its own field, is more useful to mankind than the other two; and each, to a greater or less extent to the ancients, has, in the last decade, grown from an experimental curiosity to such vast proportions that an estimate of it's [sic] value would, at best, be but approximate.
Electricity is undoubtedly the science of the future, which, in time, will revolutionize commerce and manufactures and effect an entire change in our social fabric. The noiseless motor car will soon supercede the puffing locomotive, just as the brilliant arc and incandescent lights have already replaced the flickering gas. Manual exertion, to all except the poorest, will become unnecessary and the race will physically degenerate. Distance has already been annihilated by the telegraph, and electrical air-ships promise to become formidable rivals of the craft that plough the seas. Yet, although the locomotive will soon be a thing of the past, steam will always be as useful as it is today, because each advance in electrical science causes a corresponding necessity for more power, and the only practical method of producing this which is known at present is by employing the steam engine.
As the latter becomes more and more common in a nation that nation moves nearer and nearer toward perfect civilization. War and internal strife give way to the arts of peace and Prosperity and Affluence,
