"This word _humbug_ is in great request. It is of modern origin, and the moderns are making the most of it. Everything new, while going through its incipient stage, is denominated 'humbug.' Everything and everybody a whit in advance of the age or its intelligence is looked at askance by the gaping crowd, and 'humbug' is the ready watchword. The community's acknowledged leaders, and whose antics, at times, should have taught them that 'A little learning is a dangerous thing,' are asked by their too credulous disciples to give them their opinion on some new and startling development in physics or man's intellectual nature, and immediately these 'learned Thebans,' scorning the patient toil and honest purpose of the true student, turn their blear eyes upon the interrogations and shout Humbug! Humbug! "In such cases their visual organs are of about as much service to them as the sun is to that burrowing animal which shuns the light of day. When will men, even whose gray hairs seem to ask us to expect better things of them, learn that bareface assertion weighs not as evidence with those who choose to think for themselves? Ours is a thinking age, and requires something more than the bold _say so_ of any man to convince people that a thing _may_ or _may not_ be. We live at a period, too, and in the midst of minds which have learned that much that was received as unadulterated truth by the past, upon which the dust of buried centuries had gathered and seemed to hallow, has been proved erroneous by the light of advancing knowledge and the searching analysis of science. And who shall say where that knowledge is to stop? Is there to be no new unfolding of man's intellectual powers? Is he ever to remain in the comparative ignorance he now is in respecting the relations which he, while here in this life, sustains to the spiritual world? Are the laws of his being and its attributes as yet entirely revealed to him? Is the physical of this world of so much importance that the astounding developments of this and the coming cycles of time are to be confined entirely to that, to the exclusion of man's higher and more ethereal nature? These questions I leave your correspondent C. D. and his coadjutor J. W. H. to answer for themselves in their more reflective hours.