hat which is outside your daily life is not of account to you. Do
you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and
yet which are, that some people see things that others cannot? But
there are things old and new which must not be contemplated by men's
eyes, because they know, or think they know, some things which other
men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants
to explain all, and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing
to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new
beliefs, which think themselves new, and which are yet but the old,
which pretend to be young, like the fine ladies at the opera. I
suppose now you do not believe in corporeal transference. No? Nor in
materialization. No? Nor in astral bodies. No? Nor in the reading
of thought. No? Nor in hypnotism . . ."

"Yes," I said. "Charcot has proved that pretty well."

He smiled as he went on, "Then you are satisfied as to it. Yes? And
of course then you understand how it act, and can follow the mind of
the great Charcot, alas that he is no more, into the very soul of the
patient that he influence. No? Then, friend John, am I to take it
that you simply accept fact, and are satisfied to let from premise to
conclusion be a blank? No? Then tell me, for I am a student of the
brain, how you accept hypnotism and reject the thought reading. Let
me tell you, my friend, that there are things done today in electrical
science which would have been deemed unholy by the very man who
discovered electricity, who would themselves not so long before been
burned as wizards. There are always mysteries in life. Why was it
that Methuselah lived nine hundred years, and 'Old Parr' one hundred
and sixty-nine, and yet that poor Lucy, with four men's blood in her
poor veins, could not live even one day? For, had she live one more
day, we could save her. Do you know all the mystery of life and
death? Do you know the altogether of comparative anatomy and can say
wherefore the qualities of brutes are in some men, and not in others?
Can you tell me why, when other spiders die small and soon, that one
great spider lived for centuries in the tower of the old Spanish
church and grew and grew, till, on descending, he could drink the oil
of all the church lamps? Can you tell me why in the Pampas, ay and
elsewhere, there are bats that come out at night and open the veins of
cattle and horses and suck dry