way
connection between Constantinople and Bombay and between Baku and Bombay
in the next half-century. From such grades of certainty as this, one may
come down the scale until the most obscure mystery of all is reached:
the mystery of the individual. Will England presently produce a military
genius? or what will Mr. Belloc say the day after to-morrow? The most
accessible field for the prophet is the heavens; the least is the secret
of the jumping cat within the human skull. How will so-and-so behave,
and how will the nation take it? For such questions as that we need the
subtlest guesses of all.

Yet, even to such questions as these the sharp, observant man may risk
an answer with something rather better than an even chance of being
right.

The present writer is a prophet by use and wont. He is more interested
in to-morrow than he is in to-day, and the past is just material for
future guessing. "Think of the men who have walked here!" said a tourist
in the Roman Coliseum. It was a Futurist mind that answered: "Think of
the men who will." It is surely as interesting that presently some
founder of the World Republic, some obstinate opponent of militarism or
legalism, or the man who will first release atomic energy for human use,
will walk along the Via Sacra as that Cicero or Giordano Bruno or
Shelley have walked there in the past. To the prophetic mind all history
is and will continue to be a prelude. The prophetic type will
steadfastly refuse to see the world as a museum; it will insist that
here is a stage set for a drama that perpetually begins.

Now this forecasting disposition has led the writer not only to publish
a book of deliberate prophesying, called "Anticipations," but almost
without premeditation to scatter a number of more or less obvious
prophecies through his other books. From first to last he has been
writing for twenty years, so that it is possible to check a certain
proportion of these anticipations by the things that have happened, Some
of these shots have hit remarkably close to the bull's-eye of reality;
there are a number of inners and outers, and some clean misses. Much
that he wrote about in anticipation is now established commonplace. In
1894 there were still plenty of sceptics of the possibility either of
automobiles or aeroplanes; it was not until 1898 that Mr. S.P. Langley
(of the Smithsonian Institute) could send the writer a photograph of a
heavier-than-air flying machine actually in the