This age does seem to have exhausted invention nearly; still, it has one important contract on its hands yet—the invention of the _phrenophone_; that is to say, a method whereby the communicating of mind with mind may be brought under command and reduced to certainty and system. The telegraph and the telephone are going to become too slow and wordy for our needs. We must have the _thought_ itself shot into our minds from a distance; then, if we need to put it into words, we can do that tedious work at our leisure. Doubtless the something which conveys our thoughts through the air from brain to brain is a finer and subtler form of electricity, and all we need do is to find out how to capture it and how to force it to do its work, as we have had to do in the case of the electric currents. Before the day of telegraphs neither one of these marvels would have seemed any easier to achieve than the other. While I am writing this, doubtless somebody on the other side of the globe is writing it too. The question is, am I inspiring him or is he inspiring me? I cannot answer that; but that these thoughts have been passing through somebody else’s mind all the time I have been setting them down I have no sort of doubt. I will close this paper with a remark which I found some time ago in Boswell’s ‘Johnson’: ‘Voltaire’s “Candide” is wonderfully similar in its plan and conduct to Johnson’s “Rasselas”; insomuch that I have heard Johnson say that if they had not been published so closely one after the other that there was not time for imitation, _it would have been in vain to deny that the scheme of that which came latest was taken from the other_.’ The two men were widely separated from each other at the time, and the sea lay between. POSTSCRIPT In the ‘Atlantic’ for June 1882, Mr. John Fiske refers to the often-quoted Darwin-and-Wallace ‘coincidence’: