pariah of the arch-heretic or schismatic, if they no longer deliver him up to the executioner, they treat him with the same relative vigour. They excommunicate him, in their fashion, and cast him out of sane healthy humanity as a degenerate, a mystic, an _exalté_. The future will have the same opinion of them as we have, to-day, of their predecessors. Their attitude prevents the most cultured, the most capable mediums from allowing their psychic faculties to become known. If these mediums spoke of visions, a douche would be recommended! If they caused a table to move without contact, the words hysteria and fraud would be heard. Is it surprising they should hide their gifts? We ought to consider mediums as precious beings, as forerunners of the future type of our race. Why should we only see degeneracy around us? Why should we not see superior beings ahead of us, beacons, as it were, on the route we have to follow? Does not simple common-sense suggest that humanity has not yet arrived at perfection—that it is evolving to-day just as it has always been doing? All men have not attained the same degree of evolution. As there are types representing the average state of former days, so there are advanced types representing to-day the average state of the future. The progress of the race seems to make for perfection along the lines of the nervous system, in the acquisition of more delicate senses, of greater nervous sensibility, and of vaster means of information. If the discovery of implements, new instruments of investigation, such as the telescope and microscope, for example, aid in the progress of the race, they are of no use for the evolution of the individual himself. Now, veritable progress is individual; it is the improvement of the individual which assures the evolution of the race, and this progress should be determined by heredity. Do what we will, we shall never be born with a microscope at the eyes, and a telephone at the ears. Progress of this kind is not transmissible; only physiological acquisitions are transmissible. The sensibility of the nervous system of mediums is a progress on our relative obtuseness; it is not the same thing with the bad sight of him who makes an improper use of the microscope. If Virchow were still alive, there would be many disagreeable things to be said to him, concerning the inaptitude of the ordinary type of savant to personify the desirable progress of the race towards health, force, sensibility, and the perfect form.