the "Drink Bill"--and the rise and popularity of innumerable mushroom "cures" and systems, proves that the laws of health are still as heterogeneous from the intelligence of the majority of mankind as are the laws of the differential calculus. It would be diverting, were it not so pathetic, to see the constant endeavour on the part of the multitude to lift itself by its own hygienic boot-straps in the form of barefoot cures, mind cures, prayer cures, cures by clairvoyance, by magnetism, red or blue lights, or by pilgrimages and relics. The child moving about in worlds unrealized is still the father and epitome of the man, and sees no reason why his own will, or that of some Power wishing him individually well, should not break through the immutable sequence of cause and effect, or upset the machinery of the universe in his behalf. His childish "Let's pretend" sweeps away for the moment the dull persistency of facts and opens a world where it is possible to eat one's cake and have it too, and after dancing escape the bill for the fiddling. Speaking accurately there is, of course, no such thing as a new law of health--such laws being of their very nature eternal--but a consciousness of the hygienic code is as new as was the discovery not more than a century ago of the forces of electricity, which had, though the most powerful agent upon the earth, lain ready to our hands unrecognized throughout recorded time. The unfortunate fact that the world of knowledge is not a globe is shown by this--that if, in setting out toward a fixed goal of truth, one's face is turned in the wrong direction, no length of travel, no miracle of persistency, ever conducts to the haven where one would be. A truth of moral geography by no means universally accepted as yet, and indeed certain inherent tendencies of human nature, will forever prevent its unanimous acceptance, a chronic childishness of mind being so common that one would almost despair of the acceptance of any new truth, were it not that the adult intelligence of the few eventually imposes its conclusions upon the multitude, or enforces at least an outward concurrence. The immature-minded many are always lusting after a sign of the wonderful, and kicking against the pricks of plain truth. Bullied out of crediting the existence of ghosts and fairies, they earnestly engage in burning witches, and shamed out of such mistaken zeal fling themselves into the arms of spiritualist mediums, flirt with the theosophists, or die under the ministrations of Christian Scientists. The whole history of supernaturalism has been the history of travel in the wrong direction--a wrong turning that had its beginning in a childish impatience that would attain to its end by sudden leaps in lieu of dusty plodding along the highway that led by slow windings to the desired end.