would be characterized immediately as types of the “mild lunatics” of the age.  Unless, indeed, the whole of that August body should be initiated into the great Mysteries at once, and without any further ado or the preliminary and usual preparations or training, the F.R.S.’s could be miraculously endowed with the required sixth sense, the Adepts fear the task would be profitless.  The latter have given quite enough, little though it may seem, for the purposes of a first trial.  The sequence of martyrs to the great universal truths has never been once broken; and the long list of known and unknown sufferers, headed with the name of Galileo, now closes with that of Zollner.  Is the world of science aware of the real cause of Zollner’s premature death?  When the fourth dimension of space becomes a scientific reality like the fourth state of matter, he may have a statue raised to him by grateful posterity.  But this will neither recall him to life, nor will it obliterate the days and months of mental agony that harassed the soul of this intuitional, far-seeing, modest genius, made even after his death to receive the donkey’s kick of misrepresentation and to be publicly charged with lunacy.

Hitherto, astronomy could grope between light and darkness only with the help of the uncertain guidance offered it by analogy.  It has reduced to fact and mathematical precision the physical motion and the paths of the heavenly bodies, and—­no more.  So far, it has been unable to discover with any approach to certainty the physical constitution of either sun, stars, or even cometary matter.  Of the latter, it seems to know no more than was taught 5,000 years ago by the official astronomers of old Chaldea and Egypt—­namely, that it is vaporous, since it transmits the rays of stars and planets without any sensible obstruction.  But let the modern chemist be asked to tell one whether this matter is in any way connected with, or akin to, that of any of the gases he is acquainted with; or again, to any of the solid elements of his chemistry.  The probable answer received will be very little calculated to solve the world’s perplexity; since, all hypotheses to the contrary notwithstanding, cometary matter does not appear to possess even the common law of adhesion or of chemical affinity.  The reason for it is very simple.  And the truth ought long ago to have dawned upon the experimentalists, since our little world (though so repeatedly visited by the hairy and bearded travelers, enveloped in the evanescent veil of their tails, and otherwise brought in contact with that matter) has neither been smothered by an addition of nitrogen gas, nor deluged by an excess of hydrogen, nor yet perceptibly affected by a surplus of oxygen.  The essence of cometary matter must be—­and the “Adepts” say is—­totally different from any of the chemical or physical characteristics with which the greatest chemists and physicists of the earth are familiar—­ all recent hypotheses to the contrary notwithstanding.  It is to be feared that before the real nature of the elder progeny of Mula Prakriti is detected, Mr. Crookes will have to discover matter of the fifth or extra radiant state; et seq.