While the telegraph and the telephone can prevent speculations like the South Sea Bubble in a great measure, for such schemes were much aided by a lack of a general dissemination of intelligence, and this lack is supplied by a quick interchange of knowledge, they bring their own peculiar peril, for they are examples of what profit may be reaped from discovery in the world of science. The commercial enterprises of the world have been brought within reach of the many by the telegraph and telephone. They no longer belong to the few, while the successful working of the field of science is still confined to a minority and the general public; even the cultivated people are very ignorant of the approaches to the New El Dorado. No bogus land scheme or salted mining enterprise can be kept in existence to-day for a long period; but the Keeley motor, with its ethereal vibrations and its pseudo-molecular motions, was limited in activity only by the life of the promoter. Instead of the alchemists we have the seekers after power, which costs nothing, and in the train of the honest inventor there are unscrupulous promoters ready to capitalize any remarkable new fact or discovery which attracts public attention. I have mentioned the influence of the first Duchess of Marlborough in inducing her husband, the great duke, to sell out his shares in the South Sea Bubble when they had risen to a high value because this example of discrimination and prudence in a woman supports one in the belief that all women are not prone to invest in women’s bank schemes, in Keeley motors, or in enterprises for “carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.” One of my friends recently visited the office of a company which proposed to produce power without the expenditure of a due amount of energy, and found among those anxious to invest a woman who said that she had just received a dividend from the company for extracting gold from salt water, and she was anxious to invest it in the new power company. The dividend was the result of a liquidation of the Gold from Sea Water Company, and represented half of her original sum. She had come out of one delusion with a loss of half of her property, and was now ready to enter another one with the remaining half. It was an old-fashioned notion that women should be kept in ignorance of business, for business knowledge, it was thought, was the concern of the husbands. This notion prevails still in some quarters, and there may be some connection between the number of women in Christian Science temples and their lack of education in practical matters, or in what may be called the legal business habit--a habit which weighs the probabilities of this and that, and leads to ways of exact thinking.