Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/650

634 studies, and incorporate a manual department with your high-school. The investment will pay, and the means of further growth will soon be found.

2. Mature your plans and lay them before your wealthy, public-spirited men. Almost for the first time in America we are harvesting a splendid crop of millionaires. They abound in every city. They know that boundless wealth left to sons and heirs is often a curse, rarely a blessing, and they would fain put it to the noblest uses. In England such wealth would naturally go to the establishment of noble families, or the purchase of grand estates which should be transmitted unimpaired to the oldest sons through successive generations.

Our American peerage shall consist of those who devote the gains of an honorable career to the establishment of institutions for the better education of generations that shall come after them. Let others follow the example of Cornell, Vanderbilt, and Cooper, of New York; Stevens, of Hoboken; Girard, of Philadelphia; Johns Hopkins, of Baltimore; Case, of Cleveland; Rose, of Terre Haute; the Commercial Club, of Chicago; and those whom I could name in St. Louis.



N article on this subject in the "Nineteenth Century" for June contains conclusions so inadequately supported by trustworthy facts that a few words of comment seem to be called for. The matter in question has attained a somewhat undue prominence of late; but if it is as simple and intelligible as it appears to be to most who have investigated it with care, and with minds free from mystical bias, any aid toward the extinction of what must then be regarded as an ignis fatuus of pseudo-science carries with it its own justification.

The position of the writers of the article seems to be that it is possible for one person to divine the thoughts of another in the absence of any known means of communication. This inference is based mainly on a series of statements of cases where several children of a certain family, as well as a servant-girl in the same family, were professedly able to tell words and objects thought of in their absence, without contact with or sign from those who knew what they were required to do.

It may be taken as proved that the explanation of muscular indication amply covers all cases where, as in the well-known drawing-room game of "Willing," there is actual contact between the person who guides and the person guided. It is difficult, indeed, for the guider, who is intent on the success of the experiment, to avoid giving 