114 ARTHUR E. SHIPLEY 



very exceptional powers as an organiser and 

 as a man of business, to his integrity and to 

 the abiding interest he ever showed in the 

 cause of the advancement of knowledge. 



If we pass from the interest taken in scien- 

 tific progress by men of superior intelligence 

 to the obstacles opposed to it by popular ignor- 

 ance and superstition, we are brought face to 

 face with the long-lived crew of witches, wiz- 

 ards and alchemists. It is often said that the 

 more rationalistic outlook of the seventeenth 

 century, due to Hobbes and others, did much 

 to discredit these practitioners. But the obser- 

 vant dwellers in our British cities or remote 

 country villages, pestered as they are with 

 advertisements of those who practise palmis- 

 try, and of those who predict the future by 

 crystal-gazing or by the fall of sand, of fol- 

 lowers of the sporting prophet, and of far 

 more presumptuous and more dangerous im- 

 postors, or confronted by the silent, indomita- 

 ble belief of the rustic in the witchery of his 

 ancestors, may well hold the opinion that the 

 stock of superstition is a constant stock and 

 permeates now, as it did in Elizabeth's time. 



