[10] It can hardly be disputed that the British generals in the late war in South Africa would have done well to cut the cables altogether, or at all events reserve them exclusively for their own use. There is very good evidence that, in spite of the interdiction of "coded" messages, information passed both ways between the enemy and his agents in Europe. The resolute manner in which the Japanese kept newspaper correspondents away from the scene of action until no action remained for them to correspond about, shows conclusively what will become of the war-reporter during the few remaining decades which separate us from the final disappearance of moribund war itself from the planet. [11] Ante, Chapter III. [12] Ante, Chapter IV. [13] Ante, page 7. [14] That is to say, the gases which are most difficult to liquefy, and which consequently store up most energy in liquefying, viz., hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, as distinguished from ammonia, carbon-dioxide, chlorine, and other gases relatively easy to liquefy. [15] The Recent Development of Physical Science. By W. C. Whetham, F.R.S., 1904. London: John Murray. [16] I do not forget that a good deal of what is on record as an account of experiments in transmutation is purely mystical writing, and that when Paracelsus and some of the French alchemists describe what appear to be chemical experiments they are in reality referring to something quite different. But the learned in these matters tell me that one of their chief difficulties arises from the fact that, contemporary with the mystics, there were other investigators who, not having the key to the occult significance of the masters' writings, really devoted themselves to research, some valuable, if accidental, results of which have come down to us and are recorded in all text-books of chemistry. [17] Ante, page 79. [18] I might have "boggled" (to use one of Mr Andrew Lang's stately colloquialisms) before this suggestion, but for a remark by Dr C. W. Saleeby, which may here be quoted, to keep me in countenance. "Malaria," he writes in Nova Medica, Nov. 1904, "which causes more illness than any other disease, is already obsolescent. Tuberculosis, which causes more deaths than any other disease, can be disposed of, apparently, whenever the human race, now mightily smitten with internecine strife, decides that this campaign against a common foe is worth while. It takes some seconds to realise--or begin to realise--what the extinction of tuberculosis will signify in private and hospital practice. Yet the extermination of the last tubercle bacillus is an event quite certainly hidden in the womb of time--time pregnant by science." [19] Ante, page 34. [20] Ante, Chapter III. [21] The Twentieth Century Child. Chapter III. [22] Spencer: Study of Sociology. Chapter XV.