Note 2 — Chapter XVIII · A PIONEER IN AN UNKNOWN REALM.

Had Keely been better understood, science might have been marching with giant strides across this unknown realm during the many years in which men of learning have refused to witness the operation of the dissociation of water, because one of their number decided, in 1876, that Keely was using compressed air. Fixing bounds to human knowledge, she still refuses to listen to the suggestion that what she has declared as truth may be as grossly erroneous as were her teachings in the days when the rotation of the earth was denied; this denial being based upon the assertions of all the great authorities of more than one thousand years, that the earth could not move because it was flat and stationary. Herodotus ridiculed those who did not believe this. For two thousand years after the daily rotation of the earth was first suggested, the idea was disputed and derided. The history of the past, says General Drayson, who claims to have discovered a third movement of the earth, teaches us that erroneous theories were accepted as grand truths by all the scientific authorities of the whole world during more than five thousand years.2 Although the daily rotation of the earth and its annual revolution around the sun had been received as facts by the few advanced minds, some five hundred years before Christ, yet the obstructions caused by ignorance and prejudice prevented these truths from being generally accepted until about three hundred years ago, when Copernicus first, and afterwards Galileo, revived the theory of the earth’s two principal movements. Human nature is the same as in the days when Seneca said that men would rather cling to an error than admit they were in the wrong; so it is not strange that General Drayson, as the discoverer of a third movement, has not received the attention that he deserves, although his mathematical demonstrations seem to be beyond dispute.