What, after all, is Imagination? It is a great many things. It is a sense of beauty and harmony. It is an instinct of poetry and of prophecy. A Persian poet describes it as an immortal sense of memory which is always striving to recall the beautiful things the Soul has lost. Another fancy, also from the East, is that it is “an instinctive premonition of beautiful things to come.” Another, which is perhaps the most accurate description of all, is that it is “the Sun-dial of the Soul on which God flashes the true time of day.” This is true, if we bear in mind that Imagination is always ahead of Science, pointing out in advance the great discovery to come. Shakespeare foretold the whole science of geology in three words--“Sermons in stones,”--and the vast business of the electric telegraph in one line--“I’ll put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes.” One of the Hebrew prophets “imagined” the phonograph when he wrote “Declare unto me the image of a voice.” As we all know, the marks on the wax cylinder in a phonograph are “the image of a voice.” The air-ship may prove a very marvellous invention, but the imagination which saw Aladdin’s palace flying from one country to another was long before it. All the genii in the Arabian Nights stories were only the symbols of the elements which man might control if he but rubbed the lamp of his intelligence smartly enough. Every fairy tale has a meaning; every legend a lesson. The submarine boat in perfection has been “imagined” by Jules Verne. Wireless telegraphy appears to have been known in the very remote days of Egypt, for in a rare old book called _The History of the Pyramids_, translated from the Arabic, and published in France in 1672, we find an account of a certain high priest of Memphis named Saurid,--who, so says the ancient Arabian chronicler, “prepared for himself a casket wherein he put magic fire, and shutting himself up with the casket, he sent messages with the fire day and night, over land and sea, to all those priests over whom he had command, so that all the people should be made subject to his will. And he received answers to his messages without stop or stay, and none could hold or see the running fire, so that all the land was in fear by reason of the knowledge of Saurid.” In the same volume we find that a priestess named Borsa evidently used the telephone. For, according to her history, “She applied her mouth and ears unto pipes in the wall of her dwelling, and so heard and answered the requests of the people in the distant city.”