At this time Mr. Keely had not reached that stage in his researches when he could carry out the suggestions made by the able writer of the Ledger leader; and if our discoverer of an unknown force had not been known to some persons "endowed with large faith" in his discovery, it would have been lost to the world. An anonymous writer has said the idea that living nature is not a collection of dead-heads, never seems to have struck the non-progressivists. The thing that is has been, and the thing that is will continue to be; this is the sum and substance of the doctrine they profess. They commit the mistake of supposing they live in a finished planet when in reality they exist on an orb that has relatively just begun to live. The time allowed us for observation and study of nature and of ourselves, is limited in a marked degree. Just when we are beginning to know how to read the book, we are forced to close its pages because the intellectual eyesight finds itself within the trammels of age. All we can do is to make a hit here, and a hit there, and to hand on our little bit of intelligence to those who come after us, in the hope that they also will keep their eyes and ears open, and, in like manner, hand on a cumulative store of knowledge to their heirs and successors. During the brief span of a man's existence, then, it is difficult for him to prove much progress either in himself or in his surroundings. The eternal hills seem the same to him when the light of life dies out, as when first his eyes beheld their outlines. Stern, uncompromising, apparently immutable, the hills remain to him the type of all that is fixed, all that is unchangeable around. Yet this is not the story of science. Tennyson, who is always true to nature, says:-- "The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mists, the solid lands; Like clouds they shape themselves and go." In Memoriam, cxxiii., 2nd Stanza. This is good poetry; better still, it is good science. The Himalayas, big and grand as they are, must represent mountains whose rise was a thing of a very "recent" date, geologically speaking. This is proved, because we see rocks belonging to a relatively recent age, appearing as part and parcel of their lofty peaks. Very different is the case with the hills and mountains of, say, north-western Scotland. There you come upon peaks of an age well-nigh coëval with the world's earliest settling down to a steady, solid, and respectable existence. The Scottish hills are the old, the very old, aristocrats of the cosmical circle; the Himalayas, Alps, and the rest, are the new race whose origin goes not further back than a generation, as it were.