Are children of a larger growth any less receptive to the marvellous? “Great oaks from little acorns grow.” The seed first planted in virgin soil later bears an abundant harvest. Stage plays, operas, poetry, romances, painting, and sculpture dealing with the supernatural command quite as great a popularity, to-day, as ever. Fortune telling, palmistry, astrology, clairvoyance, hypnotism, and the rest, continue to thrive either as a means of getting a living, or of innocent diversion, leaving their mark upon the inner consciousness just the same in one case as in the other. So much being undeniable, it stands with every honest inquirer after truth to look these facts in the face without blinking. Ignorance we dare not plead. The dictates of a sound common sense will not permit us to dismiss what we do not understand with a laugh, a shrug, or a sneer. “To scold is not to answer.” Superstition is not easily defined. To say that it is a disposition to believe more than is warranted by reason, leaves us just as helpless as ever; for where reason is impotent we have nothing tangible left to fall back upon. There is absolutely no support on which to rest that lever. Religion and philosophy, which at first fostered superstition, long ago turned against it all the forces they possessed. Not even science may hope to overthrow what can only be reached through the inner consciousness of man, because science can have little to do with the spiritual side of man. That intangible something still eludes its grasp. If all these combined forces of civilization have so far signally failed to eradicate superstition, so much the worse for civilization. We might also refer to the efforts of some very erudite scholars to interpret modern superstition by the aid of comparative mythology. Vastly interesting, if not wholly convincing, theories have been constructed on this line. Instructive, too, is the fact that some of our most familiar nursery stories may be traced to the ancient folk-lore of still older peoples. Even a remote antiquity is claimed for the familiar nursery tale of “Jack and Jill”; while something very similar to the story of “Little Red Riding Hood” is found, in its purity, in the grewsome werewolf folk-lore of Germany; and “Jonah’s Gourd,” of the East, we are told, probably is the original of “Jack and the Beanstalk” of the West. But the very fact of the survival of all these hoary superstitions, some of them going back so far that all further trace is lost, certainly furnishes food for thought, since they seemingly enjoy as great a popularity as ever. Superstition being thus shown to be as old as human history, the question naturally arises, not how it may have originated in the Dark Ages, but how it has kept its hold so tenaciously throughout all the succeeding centuries down to our own time.