ABSTRACT
Until the Great Exposition of 1900 closed its doors in November, Adams haunted it, aching to absorb knowledge, and helpless to find it. Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. Historians undertake to arrange sequences, – called stories, or histories, – assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect. The knife-edge along which he must crawl, like Sir Lancelot in the twelfth century, divided two kingdoms of force which had nothing in common but attraction. Yet in mechanics, whatever the mechanicians might think, both energies acted as interchangeable forces on man, and by action on man all known force may be measured. The pursuit turned out to be long and tortuous, leading at last into the vast forests of scholastic science.
