The second-sight and clairvoyance of the witches and the demoniacs, of the mystica and the mesmerist*, having been exposed and discredited, the same things are still from time to time revived under new names more suited to a generation which has got rid of some of the nomenclature of the past. Telepathy sounds better to modern ears than mesmeric trance or clairvoyance, but it has no more substantial foundation. It is an attempt to discover whether it is possible to see without eyes, to hear without ears, to receive or convey impressions without the aid of the special senses. The spirit-rappers, the Davenports, the Bishops, the thoughtreaders, the animal magnetisers, have dropped into darkness, and are buried in oblivion. Telepathy is a silly attempt to revive in a pseudo-scientific form such as self-deception of this kind has always assumed, but in a very feeble form, and with very futile and inane results, the failures and impostures of the past. Happily, the belief in telepathy is confined to a few, and those,. I am ashamed to say, chiefly in this country.

It has had a feeble and lingering existence, and is undoubtedly destined to die a premature death.

To conclude: these delusions, this miracle-monger-ing, these disordered visions and hysteric hallucinations, this exploitation of the love of the mysterious, these pseudo-magnetic attractions, these sham scientific floatings in the air or fixations of the body, these thought-readings and foretellings, these vain pronouncements concerning unseen worlds and invisible planes of being, these playings on the fears, the hopes, the feeble senses, the eager imaginations, and the ill-balanced reason of the masses, are as old as, nay, apparently older than history. Sometimes in this, as in other things, we are tempted to ask,'Does the world make any progress, or are we still moving on the same planes and in the same grooves of ignorance and superstition, knavery, folly, and self-deception?' I think we may find comfort, however, in the historical review. It is true that we have still with us the spiritists, the stage hypnotists, the living magnets, the Mahatmas, the belated psychical researchers, and the ghost seers.

But they are only the stunted remnants, the vestigial and atrophied traces indicating the later stages of ages of development, in which we have outgrown the period when such follies and fallacies were the almost universal heritage of mankind, and led to burnings, drownings, torture, and wholesale misery, when the cataleptics and hypnotics were counted by thousands and sometimes by hundreds of thousands at a time, when imposture was widespread and high-placed, when philosophers were the dupes of their own self-deception, and when the mischiefs of hypnotic suggestion were extended Over large districts and sapped the reason and ruined the lives of thousands. There are still performances and publications which in their follies and their capacities for mischief rival some of those prevalent in the darkest periods of ignorance and superstition, but they are at the present time regarded as curiosities and eccentricities, and provoke laughter and derision Where formerly they would have led to insanity and persecution.