The facts or fancies cited by Mr. Galton in proof that praying is of no use are the following: 1. 'Sick people who pray or are prayed for do not on the average recover more rapidly than others.' 2. Although 'the public prayer for the sovereign of every state, Protestant or Catholic, is and has been in the spirit of our own--"Grant her in health long to live"--sovereigns are literally the shortest-lived of all persons who have the advantage of affluence.' 3. The 'clergy are a far more prayerful class' than either lawyers or medical men, it being 'their profession to pray,' and 'their practice that of offering morning and evening family prayers in addition to their private devotions,' yet 'we do not find that the clergy are in any way more long-lived in consequence;' rather, there is room for believing their class to be the 'shortest-lived of the three.' Nay, even missionaries, eminently prayerful as they are themselves, and prayed for as they are with especial earnestness by others, 'are not supernaturally endowed with health,' and 'do not live longer than other people.' 4. 'The proportion of deaths at the time of birth is identical among the children of the praying and the non-praying classes.' 5. Though 'we pray in our Liturgy that "the nobility may be endowed with grace, wisdom, and understanding,"' our 'nobility are peculiarly subject to insanity;' as are likewise, indeed, 'very religious people of all denominations,' 'religious madness being very common indeed.' 6. So far from 'religious influences' appearing to have 'clustered in any remarkable degree round the youth of those who, whether by their talents or their social position, have left a mark upon English history,' 'remarkable devotional tendencies' have been conspicuous chiefly by their absence from 'the lives either of our Lord Chancellors or of the leaders of our great political parties;' while, out of our twenty-three extant dukes, four at least, if not five, are descended from mistresses of Charles II., not a single one of them, on the other hand, being known to Mr. Galton to be of 'eminently prayerful qualities.' 7. In respect of those 'institutions, societies, commercial adventures, political meetings and combinations of all sorts' with which England so much abounds, and of which 'some are exclusively clerical, some lay, and others mixed,' Mr. Galton 'for his own part never heard a favourable opinion of the value of the preponderating clerical element in their business committees.' 'The procedure of Convocation which, like all exclusively clerical meetings, is opened with prayer, has not inspired the outer world with much respect.' Nay, 'it is a common week-day opinion of the world that praying people are not practical.' 8. In those numerous instances in which an enterprise is executed by the agency of the profane on behalf not of the profane themselves but of pious clients, 'the enterprises are not observed to prosper beyond the average.' Underwriters recognise no