26 W. M. HAMLET. 



time we send an electric wave rippling through space in 

 our modern etherial telegraphy to be intercepted by a 

 receiver placed at a given distance, yet even this is eclipsed 

 by our everyday system of recording wave-messages now 

 on their way from the furthest so-called fixed star, to be 

 recognised by their spectra. Thus winged thought brings 

 us to that fundamental idea of continuity of existence with- 

 out break or interruption that Sir Oliver Lodge x insists 

 upon as needing "inculcation more generally among people 

 of the present day." 



And here I tender my friendly farewell, believing that 

 the Time-Spirit demands now and then some general present- 

 ation of the many and diverse groups of facts systematic- 

 ally classified and generally labelled as science. This I 

 have endeavoured to do, all too conscious that my efforts 

 are but desultory, and perhaps wide of the mark after all, 

 yet one feels that it would have been both inadequate and 

 unsatisfactory to have limited our attention to a single 

 specialised branch of knowledge that only appeals to the 

 few. Here in Australia, we live at the nerve-exciting 

 terminals of our electric news-distributors, and something 

 may be said for the heterogeneous array of new facts in 

 science thrust upon our attention by means of the cable- 

 gram, often in the form of an astonishingly bald statement, 

 to be afterwards confirmed, modified, or discounted by the 

 fuller accounts published in the scientific journals. These 

 facts, when collated and placed in their relative niches in 

 the temple of science, all point to the one consentaneous 

 generalisation, that there is no solution of continuity in 

 our polyphased aspect of this great and beautiful universe. 

 It is moreover in the contemplation of this grandeur of 

 unity that we sometimes feel like one who having at last 

 found his way through the maze of labyrinthine passages 



1 Substance of Faith, p. 105. 



