We are indeed confronted with the curious fact that even so-called intelligent people can be led to believe that what we have learned in regard to the working of Nature may be thrown aside, and that some new and unrelated laws may rule supreme. Thus we have what is called Christian Science, one of the intuitional sciences which may be said to add a new peril to matrimony. We find cultivated men believing that a government can make money by pronouncing silver equal to gold. Thus there are those who fondle their delusions and those who bank upon credulity. Education seems to be ineffectual with some temperaments; on the whole, however, it has a saving grace, and there are undoubtedly a number in the community who would welcome a source of scientific authority which might answer for them just as the Times does in political and economic questions to an Englishman. The American has especial reason to fear scientific bubbles, for our patent laws make it comparatively easy for promoters to make a great show of vested rights. One method is to build an imposing plant, with powerful dynamos and with a multiplicity of electrical devices, and to capitalize for an enormous sum an expensive plant in sight with millions in patents of very little value. The proposed investor is taken to see the great plant; its magnitude appeals to his reverence for size, and his pocketbook is soon at the service of the promoter. Another method is to select some scheme which is on the borderland between physics and chemistry, such as the electrolytic method of obtaining gold from salt water. There is a minute quantity of gold in salt water, and the chemist, thinking that electricity might afford an economical method of treating large quantities of water, is reticent in regard to such a scheme, while the electrician, ignorant of chemistry, is ready to concede that the chemists may have found a cheap extractor, so the promoter can play the chemist against the electrician, and there is no arbitrator in sight. The American is peculiarly in peril from the absence of a large body of men trained in technical science, such as exist in Germany. He also has been unduly excited, and his desire for love of sudden wealth stimulated by phenomenal successes. The commercial triumph of the telephone has led to a multitude of scientific bubbles, and has resulted, like the discovery of gold in the Klondike, in a rush into electrical schemes which have been held up to a hungry crowd of victims as second only to the Bell telephone.