I undertook to answer him and contended that the sun is not variable in its heating power, and furnishes no more heating power to the earth at one time than another. That there is no increase in its effective radiation. That the sun does not furnish heat to the earth at all, and is not a thermal or heating engine as claimed by the scientists, but is an electric generator like the earth and does not need to be hot. That the sun furnishes the electric power and the earth heats itself. In other words, the sun furnishes powerful currents of electricity which come in contact with the earth's opposite electricity and the resistance of its atmosphere, and which are converted into light, heat and vital force down near the earth's surface. The electric power furnished by the sun does not vary, but is measured by the attracting power of the earth as a vast magnet. Therefore all excess of heat is due to local causes and the uneven distribution of the sun's electric current on the earth's surface. This unequal distribution of sun currents, causing excessive heat in the west, was produced by light rainfall during the previous year, and the harvesting of large areas in Kansas, Missouri and adjacent territories, thus exposing a dry soil and preventing the accumulation of moisture necessary to form clouds. The succeeding summers justified my position and refuted the predictions of the learned professor and other scientists. In mentioning these things I mean no disparagement to Prof. Serviss, whom I hold in high esteem, and only find fault with the old traditions which he upholds. I am a friend to all scientists and regard them as earnest workers seeking the truth. But they follow accepted and antiquated authority too closely, and thus "the blind lead the blind." They are too often one-sided and impracticable. Men who study apes and beetles or atoms and gases all their lives are no judges of angel's faces or of the scope and design of the universe. Prof. Proctor's testimony that "nine-tenths of the astronomers employ their powers in making observations at great pains and labor which are not worth the paper on which they are recorded," is a plain statement of their tendency to be cranky and impracticable. Some are so one-sided they think mathematics is everything. Mathematics in its place, like the miser, is good to count gains after they are acquired; but had man relied on mathematics he would have remained as ignorant of the fundamental truths of the universe as the Blackfoot Indians. Newton owed none of his discoveries to mathematics. When his constructive imagination formulated a theory he tried to bolster it up with mathematics. But it generally proved as delusive as did his calculation that the sun was 1,669,300 degrees hot.