natural chances of human occurrence which occasion the belief of the credulous in telepathy. He recognises that the human nervous system is built on a common plan, and that it is to be expected that the sensory stimuli received from a given environmental condition will often arouse the same train of thought in two or more people, standing together, especially in those who habitually associate. Such coincidences of thought, which astonish the ignorant, are due to natural law. Human experience shows that judgements of fundamental importance which would, if transmittable to another at a distance by telepathy, win a fortune, save a defeat, etc., are never so transmitted. The Stock Exchange and the army in the field must have their telephone and telegraph systems and messengers. No more concentrated will to send information, which might bring succour, say from the artillery, could be given than by men in peril of their lives in the trenches, when the enemy came swarming over the top, but we know that with the wires cut and the human messengers killed no succour came. Neither does it come to the liner which, in full proud course with its freight of thousands of souls strikes an iceberg, unless the wireless mechanism be installed and operated so that the S.O.S. signal is despatched. Otherwise it sinks without trace, as the Germans advised their 'U' boats to let their victim merchant ships sink.

The phenomena of wireless telegraphy and of radio-active elements have led people to think that some direct means of communication of energy from one brain to another may be possible, that is without intervention of the special senses. There is not the least evidence in favour of this view; the evolution of the senses is wholly against it. It is true that all vital activity is accompanied by electrical change—by a flow of electrons—in the living matter, the nervous impulse itself may be so transmitted. Such electrical change by a special evolution of structure is magnified in the electric organ of certain fishes and used by them as a weapon of offence. It is then sensed just as an electric shock from a battery is sensed, and the intensity of the shock lessens inversely as the square of the distance. There is no evidence that the minute electrical changes accompanying nervous action in man are transmittable to a distance through space; the nerves are evolved to confine and convey these as nerve impulses to suitable receivers within their body whereby function is co-ordinated.

A radio-active element enters into the composition of the living matter, e.g. potassium. A nutritive fluid can be prepared from a watery solution of sodium calcium and potassium salts capable of keeping the excised heart of the frog in action. The place of potassium in this fluid can be taken by the energy radiated from radio-active material placed suitably near the weak solution of the other two salts which contains the heart. Too strong a radiation kills the heart. Wonderful as this new discovery is it is comparable with the well-known fact that the radiant energy of the sun—either heat rays or the cold ultraviolet rays of intense chemical action—while beneficent, when properly graded, kill the living substance which is over-exposed to them. Hence the evolution of the green colour of plants and the pigment in the skin of animals, which acts as screens.

It has recently been shown that trees pick up the long waves used in wireless telegraphy, and can be used as receivers, but there is no evidence that animals are sensitive to these waves. No one knew either of their existence or of that of magnetic storms until instruments were invented suitably tuned to pick up the waves of energy and demonstrate them to one or other of man's special senses—sight, hearing or touch.

Every invention of science goes to prove that knowledge enters only through the avenue of the senses, which are tuned to the receipt of certain forms of energy. Other forms of energy to which the senses are not tuned must be converted by instrumental means into a form of energy which can be sensed.

Contrary then to scientific evidence is the supposition that waves of energy proceed directly through space from the watery granular living substance of one brain, confined within skull and skin, and passes into the similar substance of another. If any such direct transmission and reception of energy were possible why were æons spent in the evolution of sense organs, and why is the labour of men spent in perfecting the means of communication of his thoughts by observation of the movements of expression, by speech, writing, semaphore, heliograph, telegraph and telephone and by waves of energy sent through wires or wireless space?

In The Road to Endor, we read how two clever officers, E. H. Jones and C. W. Hill, giving the whole time of a tedious captivity to evolving tricks of the business, successfully fooled a hundred of their fellow-officer prisoners, men of intelligence and education, into belief in telepathy. In the appendix of their book there is given a portion of their telepathy code to show the sort of system which may be worked, a code which allowed the communication of the names of hundreds of common articles, numbers, the names of all the officers in the camp, etc. They could use the code with, or without speaking; perfection in its use, the authors say, involved a good deal of memory work and constant practice. 'Nothing but the blankness of our days, and the necessity of keeping our minds from rusting could have excused the waste of time entailed by preparation for a thought-reading exhibition. It is hardly a fitting occupation for free men.' What these officers could do obviously the professional conjurer can do, no less the humbug and quack who swindles money out of the credulous and superstitious. Let no one give credence to telepathy till he or she has read this most amusing and educative book. The authors no less humbugged the camp by planchette writing whereby they transmitted messages supposed to come from disembodied spirits. They fooled not only their fellow-prisoners with these spirit messages, but the Turkish interpreter and Commandant of the camp, gaining thereby important concessions. They planned a daring method of escape which depended on exciting the cupidity of the Commandant and on a hunt for buried treasure, occupying many months of preparation, and only failing at the last through the unwitting interference of a brother officer. Some of their 'spirit' messages were actually transmitted through the Commandant to the War Office in Constantinople, so implicit became his obedience. What these two officers affected is unequalled by anything in Sir Oliver Lodge's evidence as set forth in Raymond. They give details of how they used chance remarks and trivial facts heard and memorised months beforehand, and of how they observed and were guided by the slightest variation in tone of answer or movement of their victims, which expressed interest and excitement or the reverse, and so built up a story of some past action which clinched belief. The hits were striking and memorised, and the misses unnoticed, forgotten—for such is the tendency of the human mind. Such are the methods of the professional medium, and in The Road to Endor they lie unravelled and fully exposed.

The physiologist recognises the tendency of those with unstable, nervous temperaments—e.g. hysterical girls—to gain interest and cause excitement at any cost of trouble in developing methods of deceit. Hence the ghostly visitations of houses, the mysterious bell-ringings, rappings, spillings of water, etc. I, myself, have personally come across and investigated two of these cases—one of a young, educated woman who played pranks on the house of her hosts, pouring water into their beds, etc.; the other of a