original humor. So I have seen a prominent violinist, invited to play at a reception, try to keep on amidst the waxing murmur of conversation, and finally falter and almost break down. In this laboratory-fixation age it is well to remember that certain even of the physical sciences quite or mostly elude laboratory experimentation. Take astronomy, a great and promising but difficult and problematical field of research. No sun of all the millions, no planet, no planetary satellite, no comet, no tiniest of the asteroids can be brought into a laboratory. Once in a while a meteoric stone reaches the earth, and this can be analyzed, but no laboratory can control or predict time or place of its falling. It is necessary to devise agencies, telescopes, spectroscopes and so on, which, in a sense, go out and bring back data about the subjects of this science, and to develop methods of mathematical deduction by which to reach conclusions which are accepted by most people on authority only, since to most people the mathematics is quite unintelligible. Astronomy, perhaps entitled to be called the most ancient of sciences, is one of the most difficult. A multitude of theories to account for its multitudinous phenomena have been supplanted by others; within the memory of persons now living many opinions once firmly held have been discarded or at least called in question. This is not in the least to the discredit of the science, but it is a fact. Today there are many contradictions of opinion among astronomers. While an article by a scientific man was printing in the _Scientific American_ expressing the common view that in a little while, about a million million years, the earth will become too cold for anybody to live on it, another scientist was announcing to the world his reasons for questioning that conclusion. Even facts of a declared visual character are called in question. Professor Percival Lowell to his death in 1916 supported Schiaparelli’s announced discovery of canals on Mars, described them as he saw them through the telescope, and declared that they must be of artificial origin. It is said that there are astronomers who can see the canals but who question that they are artificial. And it is certain that there are astronomers who deny that there are any canals at all, and who claim that what seem to be canals to some are optical illusions or sheer hallucinations. (Is not astronomy getting to look like psychic research?) But in spite of all its shifting and reconstruction of theories, its assertions and counter-assertions, the complexity and enormous difficulty of its numerous problems, and the exceedingly subtle methods by which, in a great measure, these problems must be studied, no one is so foolish as to think that astronomical investigation should not be pursued, or that there does not lie before it a great field for the pursuit of truth.