ll as of personal events, and I know
no one with regard to whom my intuitions--absolutely lacking in any
physical ground of proof, or even mental ground of comprehension--have
been stronger or more obstinate.

At the time of my first visit to America, so far back as 1885, I had not
the faintest conception of Keely's work, or what he claimed to have
discovered or to be on the track of discovering. I never heard his name
mentioned without being told at the same time that he was either a silly
madman or a conscious impostor, and as I came with an entirely
unprejudiced mind (for I had never heard of Keely before landing in
America), it would have been natural to accept this universal opinion.

Yet something stronger than reason was always silently contradicting
these assertions, when made in my presence. Friends and acquaintances
alike in those days laughed at Keely's claims, and denounced his boasted
discovery as pure imposture.

"'Tisn't! 'Tisn't! 'Tisn't!" that persistent little voice kept
whispering in my ear all the time, like a naughty, obstinate child who
contradicts from sheer ignorance--or was it a spiritual intuition? Time
alone can answer that question; anyway, I kept my ideas to myself, for
they had no foundation in fact at the time of which I speak.

In 1897 the position for me was altered. A sensible and dependable
friend of mine--a well-known banker in Philadelphia--described to me his
experiences and those of other prominent citizens during a demonstration
of Mr Keely's powers; and the old insistent voice that spoke to my
ignorance before, spoke now to some glimmering understanding of the
claim put forth. This claim--even then jeered at by the world at
large--had to wait shivering in the cold another nine years, before Mr
Frederic Soddy clothed it in respectable scientific garb by speaking
publicly of the possibilities in the future connected with atomic
disintegration and consequent liberation of energy.

But the yelping curs of Calumny that pursued Keely during his lifetime
are still upon the dead man's tracks.

"_His_ methods were fraud and imposture, anyway"; "His wires were tubes
containing compressed air," and so forth. The M.F.H. of this pack of
hounds was the son of a lady whose name will always be honourably
mentioned with that of Keely as one of his most generous supporters.

The initial misfortune in the whole matter was the forming and starting
of the Keely Motor Company to utilise the dis