460 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ily yield of the nature of the conceptions and the logic which command 

 a certain popular interest and acceptance. The interest in these no- 

 tions, is, as Mr. Lang argues about ghosts and rappings and bogles, in 

 how they come to be believed rather than in how much or how little 

 they chance to be true. In examining the professed evidence for the 

 facts and laws and principles (sit venia verbis) that pervade astrology 

 or phrenology or palmistry or dream-interpretation, or beliefs of that 

 ilk, we find the flimsiest kind of texture that will hardly bear examina- 

 tion and holds together only so long as it is kept secluded from the light 

 of day. Far-fetched analogy, baseless assertion, the uncritical assimi- 

 lation of popular superstitions, a great deal of prophecy after the event 

 — it is wonderful how clearly the astrologer finds the indications of Na- 

 poleon's career in his horoscope, or the phrenologist reads them in the 

 Napoleonic cranial protuberances — much fanciful elaboration of de- 

 tail, ringing the variations on a sufficiently complex and non-demon- 

 strable proposition, cultivating a convenient vagueness of expression 

 together with an apologetic skill in providing for and explaining ex- 

 ceptions, the courage to ignore failure and the shrewdness to profit by 

 coincidences and half-assimilated smatterings of science; and with it all 

 an insensibility to the moral and intellectual demands of the logical 

 decalogue, and you have the skeleton which clothed with one flesh be- 

 comes astrology, and with another phrenology and with another palmis- 

 try or solar biology or descriptive mentality or what not. Such pseudo- 

 sciences thrive upon that widespread and intense craving for practical 

 guidance of our individual affairs, which is not satisfied with judicious 

 applications of general principles, with due consideration of the prob- 

 abilities and uncertainties of human life, but demands an impossible 

 and precise revelation. Not all that passes for, and in a way is, knowl- 

 edge, is or is likely soon to become scientific; and when a peasant parades 

 in an academic gown the result is likely to be a caricature. 



To achieve fortune, to judge well and command one's fellow-men, 

 to foretell and control the future, to be wise in worldly lore, are natural 

 objects of human desire; but still another is essential to happiness. 

 Whether we attempt to procure these good fortunes by going early to 

 bed and early to rise, or by more occult procedures, we wish to be 

 healthy as well as wealthy and wise. The maintenance of health and 

 the perpetuity of youth were not absent from the mediaeval occultist's 

 search, and formed an essential part of the benefits to be conferred by 

 the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone. A series of superstitions 

 and extravagant systems are conspicuous in the antecedents and the bye- 

 paths of the history of medicine, and are related to it much as astrol- 

 ogy is to astronomy or alchemy to chemistry; and because medicine in 

 part remains, and to previous generations was conspicuously an empiri- 

 cal art rather than a science, it offers great opportunity for practical 



