Pioneer Sketches of Long Point Settlement; Or, Norfolk's Foundation Builders and Their Family Genealogies (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1898. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... SKETCH CVIII. THEN AND NOW. How few of us truly appreciate the marvellous age in which we live. Wonderful inventions and startling discoveries hav, come so thick and fast upon us that we have lost the sense of appreciation and come to look upon all things as possible. We are no longer surprised at what happens, for everything seems possible, and there is certainly nothing startling about the mertrealization of a possibility. But these wonderful means of communication and transportation which we enjoy were considered --if considered at all--as absolute impossibilities by our forefathers one short century ago. This modern machinery, which seems almost endowed with life and intelligence, was not even dreamed of by our grandfathers. Their wildest imaginations failed to grasp the realizations of our day. We live in the age of the dynamo; and does it not seem strange that the only fact known to the wisest men of all antiquity, pertaining to electricity, was the fact that a piece of amber, when rubbed, attracts light and dry bodies? And not until sixteen centuries of modern history had been completed and added to the countless ages preceding them, was the discovery made that other substances possess the same property as amber. The man who made this discovery was Gilbert, of Colchester, and he it was who invented the word electricity, from electron, the Greek word for Amber. Previous to the birth of father Ephraim Tisdale the only electric machine in use in experimenting with electricity was a glass tube rubbed with a piece of cloth; and Donald McCall, of Charlotteville, was twelve years old before the world discovered that lightning was electricity Is it any wonder that we have not yet succeeded in casting out the last vestage' of a dense superstition inherited from a ...