NEW CONCEPTIONS IN SCIENCE 



as puzzled as a Hottentot if put in front of a tele- 

 phone. Were he on board a Cunard liner and, three 

 hundred miles at sea, were shown the instruments 

 of Marconi's wireless telegraphy communicating 

 with the land, it would leave him as blankly gasp- 

 ing as it does a yokel now. Could he step into a 

 psychological laboratory and be shown the delicate 

 mechanism which can be made to register on a 

 sheet of paper the precise degree of interest we take 

 in this or that word in a spoken series, or in a given 

 subject of conversation ; or that will reveal bodily 

 motions of which we are neither conscious nor can 

 control, he might suspect you of diablerie. His sus- 

 picions would grow if he saw you take a stick of 

 sealing-wax from your pocket and, by rubbing it 

 smartly, cause a fountain of water, breaking grace- 

 fully in scattered drops as it leaps in the air, so to 

 hold together as to come to the ground in a solid 

 stream. 



In fine, in a well-equipped laboratory, or before 

 a collection of modern scientific instruments, this 

 great man would feel himself just the child by the 

 sea-shore he once described. Such has been the 

 advance of five or six generations. Between the 

 discoverer of the law of gravitation and a man of 

 like powers of mind living now, lies a gap almost as 

 great as lay between Newton and an aboriginal in- 

 habitant of Great Britain. We have, literally, not 



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