Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill UNSEEN FORCES What fireside has not been regaled by the tales of Bagdad of the eleventh century, known as the " Arabian Nights," in which " favored persons were found invoking the aid of fairies, sprites, genii, etc, in the acquisition of wealth, fame and beautiful brides " ? The product of a vivid imagination, these tales have traveled the world around. Had the author of " Arabian Nights " lived in our day, without drawing upon his imagination he had found materials at hand — the forces and influences utilized by men in daily living — outrivaling all his own materials, and that without exciting a breath of suspicion as to their reality. I have seen in Oriental countries frail women as beasts of burden, bearing on their heads or shoulders earthen jugs of water for the household. In our day we have substituted gravitation to perform this service, and lo, water in abundance to supply kitchen and lavatories, " leaps and laughs with pearly spray " in every well regulated household. Had the author of " Arabian Nights " been permitted, like the author of " Looking Backward," to have annihilated the flood of years and looked upon this modern utility — this force of gravitation — at work, what a tale he had had to add to his collection. Standing under the shadow of the Cheops Pyramid, I was minded of the statement of the historian, Herodotus, that it required one hundred thousand men, toiling for twenty years, to erect this tomb for a dead king. In our age of the world, through the use of mechanical genius, we have erected skyscrapers outrivaling the great pyramid, fitting and furnishing these, where dwell the captains of industry, supplemented by hundreds of subordinates — in touch with the world at large — carrying forward the world's business; and yet we er...