PREFACE. "Progress" in its largest and fullest sense it is needless to say is a very great and comprehensive term-it is intimately identified with and accompanies every step in the defluxion of time, from the period when the Creator in his huge and perfect wisdom made the heavens and the earth. Such being the case it may be thought, and justly so, that the limited aspect of this little book is so far out of keeping with such an abounding subject, as to be scarcely worth the paper it is printed on, much less the perusal of even a generous reader. Yet one drop usually is the leader of many, and the greatest rivers have their source in the minutest springs, and as the author does not, nay could not in a treatise of such limits, aim at the slightest semblance of completeness, so perhaps he may hope for some particle of favorable criticism, small though it be, even of a commentary so insignificant. Although he has not gone into any special branch of the subject with particularity for reasons manifest, he nevertheless trusts that what allusions he has made to the significance arising from a comparison of the past with the present, even in the least of the varied phases of every day life or more important affairs, may if not directly, yet remotely induce some degree of thought, which in the busy work of the age, we are apt unheedingly to over-look and wholly forget. |