It has been said with some truth that the telephone has struck a mortal blow at such serenity of life as the Juggernaut Car of modern progress has left us. But if it has done nothing else it has furnished the physiologist with a good illustration when he sets out to expound the functions and arrangement of the elements of the central nervous system and its peripheral expansion. In addition to this general light upon a great matter the vivid experience of many an Englishman during the recent years of war adds point to a subordinate phase of the general story of the telephone, for it represents my contention as to the origin or initiative of the sensorial areas of the mosaic under consideration. Modern persons may be divided into two classes, those who want and those who do not want the telephone, and the former may be sub-divided into A, those who can, and B those who cannot get it (or could not). A and B from the present point of view may be termed Receptors, though to call the B people by that name is to speak Hibernically. With this war-time experience in our minds, we may picture a vast period of time during which the stimuli of pain, cold, warmth and touch were hammering on the skin both before it began to lose its chief hairy covering, and after that process had left man still a hairy animal, but with much-diminished amount of his ancient heritage. These stimuli fell upon the skin very much as the class A, among telephone receptors, spent numerous fruitless stimuli on Postmasters-General, Ministers in Parliament and in “short” bitter letters to our bright little _Daily Pope_, and who yet found themselves not “connected up,” as the saying goes. There is no knowing how long it was before they had enough effect on the delicate nerve fibrils struggling up into the epidermis and produced receptors or were “connected up” to the exchange or central nervous system. I am inclined to liken the pain stimuli to the short letters referred to, the cold and warmth stimuli to those addressed to the Postmasters-General and the touch stimuli to those which fell upon Ministers at question time.