88 THE KINGDOM OF MAN 



furnish a scheme into which the observed phenomena can 

 be fitted is what we may take on the authority of the 

 physicists and chemists of our day. 



Intimately connected with all the work which has 

 been done in the past twenty-five years in the nature 

 and possible transformations of atoms is the great 

 series of investigations and speculations on astral chem- 

 istry and the development of the chemical elements 

 which we owe to the unremitting labour during this 

 period of Sir Norman Lockyer. 



Wireless telegraphy. Of great importance has been the 

 whole progress in the theory and practical handling of 

 electrical phenomena of late years. The discovery of 

 the Hertzian waves and their application to wireless 

 telegraphy is a feature of this period, though I may re- 

 mind some of those who have been impressed by these 

 discoveries that the mere fact of electrical action at 

 a distance is that which hundreds of years ago gave to 

 electricity its name. The power which we have gained 

 of making an instrument oscillate in accordance with a 

 predetermined code of signalling, although detached and 

 a thousand miles distant, does not really lend any new 

 support 1 to the notion that the old-time beliefs of thought- 

 transference and second sight are more than illusions 

 based on incomplete observation and imperfect reasoning. 

 For the important factors in such human intercourse 

 namely, a signalling-instrument and a code of signals 

 have not been discovered, as yet in the structure of the 

 human body, and have to be consciously devised and 

 manufactured by man in the only examples of thought- 



1 It seems necessary to emphasize that I here say merely that no 

 " new support " is given to the notion of so-called telepathy, a support 

 some persons have wrongly claimed. I do not say that the notion is 

 rendered less likely to prove true than it was before. 



