Presently, turning from the attractions of the outdoor world, which seem just as entrancing the hundredth time you look upon them as they did the first time, particularly if you have cultivated the habit not merely of noticing but of thinking and reading about them, you take up the morning newspaper, in which most of your companions of the car are already deeply buried, and amid the political news, the personal gossip, the inevitable exploitation of the deeds of criminals, the foreign intelligence, and the social gossip that falls under your eyes, your attention is caught (this is an actual happening of not long ago) by the headline: "John Daniel, the orang-utan, is dead." This sounds odd. There has been no animal's obituary in the papers since Barnum lost his biggest elephant, and bequeathed its skeleton to science. You read further and find an interview with a professor about the human relationships, or apparent relationships, of the anthropoid apes, of whom "John Daniel" would probably have been the acknowledged king if his relatives of the woods could have understood the regard in which he was held by his white-skinned and clothes-wearing jailers. You will probably cut out that paragraph and put it aside for further consideration, remembering that there are at least three volumes in your Popular Science set at home, that on zoölogy, that on geology, and that on anthropology, in which there will be an abundance of interesting and authoritative matter bearing on this most important subject--for important you will consider it now that the death of a kind of caricature of humanity in the zoölogical garden that had so long amused the children as well as their elders with its humanlike motions, habits, looks, and pranks, has suddenly brought the whole question up among the news of the day, affording you a new light on a matter which you had hitherto thought to belong exclusively to the field of the professors of zoölogy and their students. Hereafter you will disposed to take a broader view of all these things, and will be in a better position to understand and enjoy the discussions of learned scientists when they are interviewed by newspaper men on subjects of this kind. The inquiring spirit of the time requires this concession even if in your private opinion there is no real relationship between men and apes. And, without regard to any such questions, you will find the volume on anthropology immensely interesting and informing.

Finally, as your morning's trip comes to an end, your attention is recalled from the natural to the mechanical sciences. You descend from your car or train, to go to your office. Your now fully awakened mind, alert to all the scientific relations of everything about you, can no longer keep from dwelling upon the underlying meanings of this marvelous display of realized human dreams. With the speed of the wind you are carried deep under the city's pavements, inclosed in a little flying parlor, in the midst of an artificial subterranean daylight, far beyond the reach of the solar rays, emulating the self-luminous creatures of the deep sea bottom; or you go shooting past the window of third, fourth, and fifth stories, or even above the levels of roofs, and you cannot but reflect and marvel that electricity does it all; electricity, that strange imp with blue star eyes no bigger than pin points, and a child's crown of little crinkling, piercing rays, which seemed so amusing when you were at school in the old days of frictional electric machines, when it was a great joke to give the cat a shock and see her flee with a squall, her hair standing on end in spite of herself. But now electricity has become a giant of unrivaled and terrific power, spurning the heavy-limbed Brobdingnag, steam, from its swift path, and fast making the world all its own--except its master, man, who is still, however, half afraid of his new and all-capable servant.

This modern genie of limitless power, conjured out of his deceptive bottle, can do the smallest as well as the greatest things for you. When, upon reaching your office, you telephone to your wife that Mr. Blank will be home to dinner with you, you cannot form the slightest idea of how the miracle of distant speech is accomplished unless you are either an electrician yourself, or have read intelligently upon the subject of the applications of electricity to the motivation of all kinds of machinery, a subject to which an entire volume is devoted in our series. It would be a kind of shame and reproach to an intelligent man to be ignorant of the way his telephone works, and of the simple scientific principle on which it is constructed. If telephones, and such things, were products of nature and grew on trees, we might be excusable for not knowing exactly their secret; but being made by men, with the same limitations as those that circumscribe us all, we ought at least to understand them.

Thus, by a simple review of the series of common happenings that arrive every day to everybody, we perceive how intimately and indissolubly the various branches of science treated of in this compact library of science, are linked with all that we do, including our most unconscious acts and our most habitual subjects of thought. We have taken for illustration the morning history of a person supposed to live amid urban or suburban surroundings. Equally illuminating would be that of an inhabitant of a village or a rural district, and even more suggestive in many respects. The dweller in the country is brought into closer association with the infinitely changing aspects of nature than the city dweller enjoys. The simplest incident in the life of a person living on a farm may be the beginning of a thread of connection leading, like the clue of a labyrinth, into the heart of some of the most marvelous departments of science, and resulting in a mental revolution for the fortunate person who follows out the clue under such guidance as these volumes afford. The writer has remembered from boyhood the indelible impression made upon his mind by the finding of an Indian arrowhead in a recently ploughed field. The shapeliness of the beautifully chipped piece of flint, almost as translucent at the edges as horn, the delicate tapering point which, as if by miracle, had remained unbroken probably since colonial times, the two curious little "ears" carefully formed on each side of the flat triangular base to facilitate attachment to the head of the arrow, and the thought, suggested by older persons, that this weapon might actually have been used in some midnight attack on a white settlement, made more terrifying by the frightful Mohawk war whoop and the display of the reeking scalps of human victims in the glare of burning stockade and cabins--all these things bred a keen desire to learn the particulars of the history of the red warriors of the Five Nations, the "Romans of the New World," and also to know something about the life and customs of this strange, savage race of mankind which continued to live in an "age of stone" on a continent that had never known civilization. No volume like that on the history and development of man in this series existed at that time; but if such a book had existed and had fallen into the hands of the finder of the arrowhead, it would surely have fascinated him more than "Robinson Crusoe" did, because a boy can distinguish as readily as a grown person the superior interest of the true over the pretended, provided that the true possesses the real elements of romance.

So, too, the writer remembers having an interest in mineralogy awakened in his mind, never to be obliterated, by the sight of another plowed field, in the southern skirts of the Adirondack Mountains, whose freshly turned furrows glittered in the sunshine with thickly scattered quartz crystals, some of the larger and more perfect of which blazed across, the whole breadth of the field, like huge diamonds, and made the heart of the finder beat with an excitement akin to that of the discoverer of a Koh-i-noor. There were also some very curious "stone buttons" which one could break out with a hammer from slate rocks along the Schoharie Creek, and which, when cracked open, were found to be composed of pyrites that resembled pure silver--and sometimes gold--freshly broken. Now, things of this sort are always attracting the attention and awakening the curiosity of children living in the country, but the real pleasure and instruction that they might afford are usually missed because of the lack in the family library of popularly written books on the natural sciences--a lack that we are trying to supply.

For city children and their elders, whose eyes are constantly greeted, not by hills, creeks, ponds, rivers, woods, and fields, but by sky-aspiring buildings, railroads elevated on stilts, multiple-decked suspension bridges, electric power houses, tunnels that form a second city underground, and the thousand marvels and splendors of electric illumination at night, the volumes on physics, mechanics, and electricity and magnetism have a more immediate interest and value. What the children learn about these things in school is far from sufficient to satisfy their curiosity. They need books at home to guide their inquiries as well as to answer them. Only by that means can the diffusion of scientific knowledge, and the popularization of the scientific method of getting at the truth and the meaning of things be thoroughly effected. Science, as its history plainly demonstrates, progresses most rapidly only when a great number of minds have been led to concentrate their powers upon its problems. Great genius, it is true, rides over obstacles; yet consider how much further its energies might have carried it if the obstacles had been more or less completely removed in advance. Many a young man has been led to a brilliant career, to the great advantage of his country and his time, as a result of the interest awakened in him by the clear statements of a popularly written book on some branch of science.