What astonishes us most is that this revelation has been so long delayed. How are we to explain that man has lived to this day with his domestic animals never suspecting that they harboured mediumistic or subliminal faculties as extraordinary as those which he vaguely felt himself to possess. One would have in this connection to study the mysterious practices of ancient India and of Egypt; the numerous and persistent legends of animals talking, guiding their masters and foretelling the future; and, nearer to ourselves, in history proper, all that science of augury and soothsaying which derived its omens from the flight of birds, the inspection of entrails, the appetite or attitude of the sacred or prophetic animals, among which horses were often numbered. We here find one of those innumerous instances of a lost or anticipated power which make us suspect that mankind has forestalled or forgotten all that we believe ourselves to be discovering. Remember that there is almost always some distorted, misapprehended or dimly--seen truth at the bottom of the most eccentric and wildest creeds, superstitions and legends. All this new science of metaphysics or of the investigation of our subconsciousness and of unknown powers, which has scarcely begun to unveil its first mysteries, thus finds landmarks and defaced but recognizable traces in the old religions, the most inexplicible traditions and the most ancient history. Besides, the probability of a thing does not depend upon undeniably established precedents. While it is almost certain that there is nothing new under the sun or in the eternity preceding the suns, it is quite possible that the same forces do not always act with the same energy. As I observed, nearly twenty years ago, in The Treasure of the Humble, at a time when I hardly knew at all what I know so imperfectly to-day: "A spiritual"--I should have said, a psychic-"epoch is perhaps upon us, an epoch to which a certain number of analogies are found in history. For there are periods recorded when the soul, in obedience to unknown laws, seemed to rise to the very surface of humanity, whence it gave clearest evidence of its existence and of its power. . . . It would seem, at moments such as these, as though humanity," --and, I would add to-day, all that lives with it on this earth--"were on the point of struggling from beneath the crushing burden of matter that weighs it down."