Nearly everywhere we observe this spirit translating itself into acts and phenomena. In religion it finds manifestation in repair of “creeds outworn,” in acceptance of modern miracles, in pilgrimages, in strange and futile attempts at unification—even in toleration. In politics it has overspread the earth with anarchism, socialism, communism, woman suffrage and actual antagonism between the sexes. Industrial affairs show it in unnatural animosities and destructive struggles between employers and employees, in wild aspirations for impossible advantages, in resurrection of crude convictions and methods of antiquity. In literature it has given us realism, in art impressionism, and in both as much else that is false and extravagant as it is possible to name. In morals it has gone to the length of denying the expedience of morality. In all civilized countries crime is so augmenting, the sociologists tell us, that national earnings will not much longer be sufficient to support the machinery for its repression. Madness and suicide are advancing “by leaps and bounds,” and wars were never so needless and reasonless as now. Everywhere are a wild welter of action and thought, a cutting loose from all that is conservative and restraining, a “carnival of crime,” a reign of unreason. Not everywhere: superior to all this madness, tranquil in the midst of it, and to some degree controlling it, stands Science, inaccessible to its malign influence and unaffectable by the tumult. Why?—how? God knows; I only perceive that the scientific mind has an imagination of its own kind. To him who has been trained to accurate observation and definite thought a century of years does not seem to have an end—it is simply one hundred times round the sun; and at the last moment of our _siècle_ we shall be just where we have been a million times before, under no different cosmic conditions. He is not impressed with “the sadness of it,” feels no desperation—sees nothing in it. He keeps his head—which, by the way, is worth keeping. 1898. TIMOTHY H. REARDEN