The report issued last month by the directors of the Keely Motor Company annulled this contract; and it now remains for your board to decide whether I shall, in behalf of science, continue to supply Mr. Keely with the means of continuing his researches, under the protecting auspices of the University of Pennsylvania, or leave him in the hands of those who are so blind to their own interests, as holders of stock in the Keely Motor Company, they cannot be made to see that their only hope of commercial success lies in the completion of the system that Keely is developing; and that the course proposed by Professor Leidy, and commended by Professor Hertz and Professor Fitzgerald, for Keely to follow, is the only one that will ever enable him to complete it.
This system is as much a work of evolution as is any one of the slow operations of nature. "Truth can afford to wait:" she knows that the Creator of all things never hurries. In these twenty years of toil Keely's patient perseverance has been godlike. It is the sharpest rebuke that could be uttered to those whose impatient "hue and cry" has been, "Give us a commercial engine and we will immortalize you;"--grinding from him, meantime, seven-eighths of his interests in his inventions.
But in his labours Keely finds a recompense that, as yet, "the world knows not of;" for day by day he sees the once, to him, obscure domain lit up with ever-increasing glory; a domain the boundaries of which are the boundaries of the universe: the entrance into which promises the fulfilment of the hopes of those who look forward to "a time when we shall no longer go to the blind to lead the blind in our search to make life worth living; but, instead, be able to promote, in accordance with scientific method and in harmony with law, the physical, intellectual and moral evolution of our race."
As of Newton, with the change of one word only, so one day will it be said of Keely:--
All intellectual eye--our solar round First gazing through, he by the blended power Of laws etheric, universal, saw The whole in silent harmony revolve. What were his raptures then! How pure! How strong! And what the triumphs of old Greece and Rome With his compared? When Nature and her laws Stood all disclosed to him, and open laid Their every hidden glory to his view.