It is well at least occasionally to remember that our conceptions of science and of truth, of the nature of logic and of evidence, are not so universally held as we unreflectingly assume or as we hopefully wish. Almost every one of the fundamental and indisputable tenets of science is regarded as hopelessly in error by some ardent would-be reformer. One Hampden declares that the earth is a motionless plane with the North Pole as the center; one Carpenter gives a hundred remarkable reasons why the earth is not round, with a challenge to the scientists of America to disprove them; one Symmes regarded the earth as hollow and habitable within, with openings at the poles which he offered to explore for the consideration of the “patronage of this and the new worlds”; while Symmes, Jr., explains how the interior is lighted, and that it probably forms the home of the lost tribes of Israel; and one Teed announces on equally conclusive evidence that the earth is a “stationary concave cell ... with people, Sun, Moon, Planets and Stars on the inside,” the whole constituting an “alchemico-organic structure, a Gigantic Electro-Magnetic Battery.” If we were to pass from opinions regarding the shape of the earth to the many other and complex problems that appeal to human interests, it would be equally easy to collect ‘ideas’ comparable to these in value, evidence and eccentricity. With the conspicuously pathological outgrowth of brain-functioning--although its representatives in the literature of my topic are neither few nor far between--I shall not specifically deal; and yet the general abuse of logic, the helpless flounderings in the mire of delusive analogy, the baseless assumptions, which characterize insane or ‘crank’ productions, are readily found in modern occult literature.