possible that nervous diseases and insanity, incident to the pressure of civilisation, can be eliminated. But certainly the alleviations of all but the last, and even of that except in its extreme expression as total dementia, will have advanced to a high standard. We shall no doubt, for instance, have discovered means of so acting on the sensory system that we shall be able innocuously and temporarily to paralyse at any desired spot the nerves which transmit pain. Thus, during convalescence, the injured will suffer no discomfort except that of confinement, and our means of amusing the patient by talking machines that will read and sing to him, and the theatroscopes that will project before him moving and coloured pictures of life or the play, will make the sick bed almost a paradise. As we have seen that, apart from the sentimental reasons which have been suggested, [19] animal and flesh foods must, for economical reasons, have been abandoned long before the end of the century, the grazing of cattle being far too expensive a method of utilising the soil, we may be quite sure that the sciences connected with agriculture will receive far greater attention than they now enjoy. It will grow more important with every decade to obtain the greatest possible tribute from the portions of land, steadily decreasing in area, which can be spared from the growing needs of the builder. Every discovery of the chemist which can be laid under contribution by the agriculturist will eagerly be seized upon. Every means which can be devised for replacing what we take from the soil will be utilised to the full: and of course the inevitable disappearance of the horse as a means of traction, and of the flocks and herds which now yield manure, and perhaps the gradual exhaustion of the minerals (as rock phosphates) from which artificial soil enrichers are prepared, will make it necessary to rearrange, on safe, economical and convenient lines, our present plans of sanitation. The insane wastefulness of draining into the sea cannot long be tolerated. Every conceivable means of conserving our mundane capital will have to be made use of. In other ways science will come to the rescue. The farmer's sufferings from the depredations of vermin of various kinds will perhaps never be much affected by invention, because all nature is so curiously interdependent that the eradication of one pest has an awkward way of intensifying some greater evil: we destroy birds and are punished by a plague of caterpillars. The accidents of climate, too, can perhaps only be obviated in a very small measure, though the science of meteorology, constantly being helped by facilities for better observation-reporting, will unquestionably help the agriculturist by giving him timely warnings. It seems hardly possible to doubt that the eccentricities of climate and the unexpected shifting of the rainy season in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese war must have been