have been taken towards the purification of the other.  That the city and university pre-eminently associated with the invention of the steam-engine, and consequently with the advent of the industrial revolution throughout the world, should, a century later, have produced a scarcely less pre-eminent leader of applied science towards the command of electricity is thus no isolated coincidence.  And as political economy, which is ever the theory corresponding to our phase of industrial practice, and there some of its foremost pioneers, and later its classical exponent, Adam Smith himself, so once more there are signs at least of a corresponding wave of theoretic progress.  Students of primitive civilisation and industry have now long familiarised us with their reinterpretation of what was long known as the stone age, into two very distinct [Page:  107] periods, the earlier characterised by few and rough implements, roughly used by a rude people, the second by more varied tools, of better shape, and finer edge, often of exquisite material and polish.  We know that these were wielded more skilfully, by a people of higher type, better bred and better nourished; and that these, albeit of less hunting and militant life, but of pacific agricultural skill, prevailed in every way in the struggle for existence; thanks thus not only to more advanced arts, but probably above all to the higher status of woman.  This distinction of Paleolithic and Neolithic ages and men, has long passed into the terminology of sociological science, and even into current speech:  is it too much then, similarly, to focus the largely analogous progress which is so observable in what we have been wont to generalise too crudely as the modern Industrial Age?  All are agreed that the discoveries and inventions of this extraordinary period of history constitute an epoch of material advance only paralleled, if at all, in magnitude and significance by those of prehistory with its shadowy Promethean figures.  Our own advance from a lower industrial civilisation towards a higher thus no less demands definite characterisation, and this may be broadly expressed as from an earlier or Paleotechnic phase, towards a later or more advanced Neotechnic one.  If definition be needed, this may be broadly given as from a comparatively crude and wasteful technic age, characterised by coal, steam, and cheap machine products, and a corresponding quantitative ideal of “progress of wealth and population”—­towards a finer civilisation, characterised by the wider command, yet greater economy of natural energies, by the predominance of electricity, and by the increasing victory of an ideal of qualitative progress, expressed in terms of skill and art, of hygiene and education, of social polity, etc.