SIR JOSEPH JOHN THOMSON, THE DISTINGUISHED ENGLISH PHYSICIST, RECEIVING THE FRANKLIN

MEDAL FROM LORD BALFOUR

life sprang from the sea. And the tide that ebbs and flows through our heart is composed of much the same elements as the ocean from which it was originally dipped.

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SHORT NAMES When a man makes a new invention his work is not done. He should invent a name for it. Here he is apt to fail for, being more of a mechanic than a philologist, he turns over the job to the Greek professor who manufactures one out of old roots. So it happens that many a handy little pocket tool is handicapped by a name that wraps three times around the tongue. But the people refuse to stand for it.

Consider what a Babel-like botch has been made of the job of naming the new art of photographing action. Rival inventors, rival word-wrights, and rival systems of Greek transliteration precipitated a war of words in which the chief belligerents were animatograph, animatoscope, biograph, bioscope, chronophotography, cinema, cinematograph, cinematoscope, cineograph, cineoscope, electrograph, electroscope, kinema, kinemacolor, kinematograph, kinematoscope, kineograph, kineoscope, kinetescope, motion pictures, moving pietures, photo plays, tachyscope, veriscope, vitagraph, vitascope, zootrope, zoogyrograph, zoogyroscope, and zoopraxiscope.

But the people-they call it "the movies." It is not a great name, but it is better than some at least of those listed above.

If, instead of trying to load the new machine with a name implying that it had been invented in Athens or Rome, its godfathers had given it a respectable convenient name of two syllables like "volt," "kodak," or "velox," much of this confusion might have been saved. Think how many millions of dollars, years of time, barrels of ink and

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MEDIUMS AND TRICKSTERS Those who believe in spiritistic phenomena call upon their opponents to disprove their hypothesis, and hold, rightly enough, that if ninetynine mediums are merely tricksters, it does not prove that the hundredth is not genuine. It is, of course, impossible to prove the universal negative of such a proposition. It is merely a question of probabilities. We can merely say that if spirits do return, it is extremely unfortunate that they can only return under those conditions which are most favorable for deception.

What these conditions are we can learn from the practices of amateur and professional conjurers. Let us approach the matter from another than starting point is usually adopted. Instead of speculating as to how departed spirits would manifest themselves to us, a matter which we can know nothing about, let us consider what a trickster would do if he wished to deceive the public into thinking that he was possessed of spirit power, a matter on which we have unfortunately a great deal of information. What conditions would he impose? What methods would he use? The following are the chief characteristics of such fraudulent manifestations:

(1). Darkness. The less the light

An experi

(3). Unexpectedness. menter lets us know what effect he is trying to get, and even if the experiment does not work he does not palm off some entirely different phenomenon and claim he has succeeded. The feats of the conjurer-and of the medium-are capricious and unforeseen. That is why trickery can not be guarded against by precautions in advance.

(4). Control of conditions. The conjurer and the mediums alike insist on having lights, furniture, sitters and apparatus arranged to suit themselves. On the other hand, the primary requisite of an experiment is the control of conditions. It is there: fore, incorrect to speak of experi ments with mediums. They are usually merely observations, and that under circumstances most unfavorable to correct observation.

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magician, attention.

(5). Suggestion. This is the main reliance of the next to distraction of He palms a coin while pretending to throw it into a hat or into the air. Our eyes follow the motion of his hand and interpret it according to the intent. It is easy under favorable circumstances to collective hallucinations of smell, sight or sound. Our sense of hearing is particularly liable to be deceived as to the character and direction of a sound, such as the raps and scratches which are the monest of mediumistic phenomena. (6). Concealment. A prestidigitator for his most difficult tricks requires some kind of a table, shelf or screen, but he rarely demands so convenient a shelter as the medium's cabinet or curtain.

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(7).

Tied or held hands. The re

leasing of hands and feet when they are bound, knotted and sealed is the cheapest of tricks. I have seen a man handcuffed by a policeman, tied in a bag and thrown into the river, yet he came to the surface promptly with his hands free.

(8). Involuntary assistance. The respectable and well-meaning gentlemen whom the audience select to represent them on the stage do not interfere with the magician. On the contrary, they often aid as well as give countenance. The magnetic girl who used to throw strong men about the stage was really utilizing their strength, not her own. Where several persons have their hands on a table it is impossible to prevent their taking an active part in its motion.

(9). Emotional excitement. An experimenter must preserve a cool and somewhat detached demeanor. Now, even the most convinced skeptic can not witness unmoved such violations of natural law as these, purporting to prove the existence of another world, and especially the presence of his deceased friends and relatives. The photographs taken of the seance room show us not merely that the table is suspended in mid air, but that the witnesses, watching it with bulging eyes, open mouths and strained attention, are incapable of critical observation.

In these nine points and others the conditions of successful trickery and the conditions of the seance are the same. For that reason and others most scientists do not think it worth while to spend their time on spiritualism.

MIND-CLEANING TIME

Housecleaning time, when every article of furniture from cellar to garret is handled and dusted, occurs traditionally each spring. An annual purification of the spiritual nature, when we overhaul and furbish up our morals, is set by all the churches.

We are urged to subject ourselves to periodic physical examinations.

Yet it is quite as important to keep our minds in good condition as our houses, our consciences or our bodies. Error is as contagious as disease. A false belief may make more trouble in the world than a wrong intention.

Vacation is a good time to overhaul your brain from the frontal lobe to the cerebellum. Review your axioms, revise your postulates, and reconsider the unexpressed minor premises of your habitual forms of logic. All your reasoning, however correct, all your knowledge, however great, may be vitiated by some fundamental fallacy, carelessly adopted and uncritically retained. Get a lamp and peer into all the dark corners of your mind. No doubt, you keep the halls and reception rooms that are exposed in conversation to your friends in fairly decent and creditable order. But how would you like to let them look into your cerebral garret and subliminal cellar, where the toys of childhood and the prejudices you inherited from your ancestors mold and rot?

Hunt out and destroy with great care every old rag of superstition, for these are liable at any time to start that spontaneous combustion of ideas we call fanaticism against which there is no insurance. The bigger the brain the more dangerous such things are, for they have the more fuel. A little decaying superstition in the mind of a great man has been known to conflagrate a nation.

Errors breed errors. They multiply like microbes, especially through neglect. A single false belief may infect all the sound facts you pile in on top of it. Better an empty room than a rubbish heap. In the words of our American philosopher, Josh Billings, "it is better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so.''

Go systematically through your intellectual equipment and see wherein it is deficient. Add annuals to your mental cyclopedia. Pick up each one of the sciences where you left off at school and bring it down to date. Look over the fields of art and literature to see what you have missed or misconceived. Don't let your sociol ogy get too far behind the age. See that your philosophy and psychology bear the same date as the calendar. Examine your religious creed in the light of modern knowledge to see if it needs revision. Take down the atlas and consider how long it has been since you heard from each country. Visit the planets in turn. Take another view of ancient history through the telescope provided by modern scholarship.

This inspection of one's stock of ideas is necessary because they do not keep as if they were in cold storage. They do not remain unchanged when stored away and neglected. There is a lot of thinking going on in our brains that we do not know anything about. Ideas are apt to sprout or spoil, like potatoes in a cellar. Facts will ferment from yeasty thoughts until they intoxicate the brain. Falsehoods generate ptomaines, poisoning the mind and producing inexplicable disease and death. You can not be too careful. Clean out your mind at least once a year.

SCIENTIFIC ITEMS

WE record with regret the death of Alexander Graham Bell; of Simon Nelson Patten, long professor of political economy in the University of Pennsylvania; of Jokichi Takamine, the industrial research chemist; of Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn, professor of astronomy at Groningen; of Wilhelm Wislicenus, director of the chemical laboratory at Tübingen; and of Jacques Bertillon, the French statistician.