Four hundred years ago, any, bold spirit who broached the possibilities of thought transference would have been immediately fried in oil or pleasantly stimulated, perhaps, with red hot pincers. Times change, however. Galileo, in an effort to keep his self respect without losing his head, was forced to murmur his truths to himself in a defliant which per; but when the modern student can learn without a quiver that a new universe has been discovered from which light takes a million years to travel to the earth, it is safe to assert that the world is becoming shock-proof.

Thought transference is one of the most fascinating fields of psychology, and is a never failing source of the unusual. No one can predict what will happen when the experiment, about to be attempted by the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, of conveying thought from France to Cambridge is carried out. There seems, however, to the ministrated layman, to be one rather important draw back which may stand in the way of a practicable system of mental communication. Granted that the receiver becomes aware of some perfectly splendid thought after he has placed himself in the prescribed attitude, there is no way in which he can be sure the idea is someone's erase and not his own. One will never be quite certain, in the telepathic future, whether one is a great original genius, or a rank, out-and-out plagiarist.

There is, on the other hand, at least one bright spot. Hereafter the nervous declarer will no longer be forced to hesitate between a trump and a discard while his agonized dummy, who has seen both the other hands, twitches spasmodically across the table; and their will be considerably less recklessness when one can forecast accurately whether one's opponent is about to down four of a kind, or merely two pairs.