Talking of popular science, I know no better books for exciting a man’s first interest, and giving a broad general view of the subject, than these of Samuel Laing.  Who would have imagined that the wise savant and gentle dreamer of these volumes was also the energetic secretary of a railway company?  Many men of the highest scientific eminence have begun in prosaic lines of life.  Herbert Spencer was a railway engineer.  Wallace was a land surveyor.  But that a man with so pronounced a scientific brain as Laing should continue all his life to devote his time to dull routine work, remaining in harness until extreme old age, with his soul still open to every fresh idea and his brain acquiring new concretions of knowledge, is indeed a remarkable fact.  Read those books, and you will be a fuller man.

It is an excellent device to talk about what you have recently read.  Rather hard upon your audience, you may say; but without wishing to be personal, I dare bet it is more interesting than your usual small talk.  It must, of course, be done with some tact and discretion.  It is the mention of Laing’s works which awoke the train of thought which led to these remarks.  I had met some one at a table d’hote or elsewhere who made some remark about the prehistoric remains in the valley of the Somme.  I knew all about those, and showed him that I did.  I then threw out some allusion to the rock temples of Yucatan, which he instantly picked up and enlarged upon.  He spoke of ancient Peruvian civilization, and I kept well abreast of him.  I cited the Titicaca image, and he knew all about that.  He spoke of Quaternary man, and I was with him all the time.  Each was more and more amazed at the fulness and the accuracy of the information of the other, until like a flash the explanation crossed my mind.  “You are reading Samuel Laing’s ’Human Origins’!” I cried.  So he was, and so by a coincidence was I. We were pouring water over each other, but it was all new-drawn from the spring.

There is a big two-volumed book at the end of my science shelf which would, even now, have its right to be called scientific disputed by some of the pedants.  It is Myers’ “Human Personality.”  My own opinion, for what it is worth, is that it will be recognized a century hence as a great root book, one from which a whole new branch of science will have sprung.  Where between four covers will you find greater evidence of patience, of industry, of thought, of discrimination, of that sweep of mind which can gather up a thousand separate facts and bind them all in the meshes of a single consistent system?  Darwin has not been a more ardent collector in zoology than Myers in the dim regions of psychic research, and his whole hypothesis, so new that a new nomenclature and terminology had to be invented to express it, telepathy, the subliminal, and the rest of it, will always be a monument of acute reasoning, expressed in fine prose and founded upon ascertained fact.