"Take a familiar instance: In the eighteenth century a savant brought a large stone to the Academy of Sciences in France which he declared he had seen fall from the sky. The Academy set him down as a lunatic, and Laplace, one of the members, declared it to be impossible. They all pooh-poohed the fact as ridiculous. There were no stones in the sky--therefore none could tumble down from it. Meteorites, which are merely stones which once belonged to some other planet, rush along through space until they fall into the sphere of the earth's attraction and down they tumble. You will find specimens (some of them a ton or more in weight) in every geological museum in Europe. Now everyone believes in them. I remember well when it was first declared by Röntgen that objects wrapped round with several layers of black paper and enclosed in a thick cardboard or wooden box could be accurately photographed. Scientists laughed at the idea and declared it to be impossible. 'How could light penetrate opaque screens?' they asked. But to-day every hospital in Europe is equipped with an X-ray photographic outfit. If a jar be filled with equal volumes of chlorine and hydrogen gases, so long as it is left in the dark nothing happens, but the moment a beam of light is directed on to it, the contents will explode with a loud report, and hydrochloric acid gas is formed. How? We do not know. Therefore, they say it is impossible. A lump of sugar is dropped into a glass of water. It dissolves. How? We cannot tell you. Hence they say it cannot occur, and we ought to reject these facts as impossible. A human being is formed in a pitch-dark cavity from an egg almost too small to be seen by the naked eye. How? We cannot explain it. Therefore they say we should dismiss the statement as a chimera. Hypnotism, or mesmerism as it is called, was first publicly practised in England seventy years ago by Dr. Braid. His medical brethren not only jeered at him but positively ostracised him, and so persecuted the poor man for what they in their ignorance called quackery and charlatanism, that he became socially and financially ruined. And yet to-day it is practised by hundreds of medical men, and schools of hypnotism have been established both at Nancy and here in Paris which are recognised by all the medical colleges, and yet it lies on the borderland, as it were, of spiritualism and the occult sciences. Spiritualistic phenomena are rejected on precisely the same lines of reasoning. A medium lays his hands on a heavy table. It rises bodily from the ground, or raps in answer to questions, or rocks. It appears to be endowed with life since it acts contrary to the laws of inertia. Therefore it is said that the medium is a fraud, and the phenomenon a mere piece of deception or conjuring. Another medium goes into a trance, and hands are seen to project from his body which we can feel and handle; or a cloud appears which rapidly condenses into a perfect