That I have seldom even read them is also a pitiful truth; for the mysterious nomenclature of modern chemistry, the incomprehensibility (to my ignorance) of the higher mathematics, the hopeless profundity of treatises on the tides, dynamics, electricity, and microscopic anatomicals, are, I am free to avow, worse to me than "heathen Greek," nay (for I _can_ in some sort tackle that), more difficult than the clay tablets of Assyria or a papyrus of Rameses II.
So I must confess to being an idle drone among the working bees.
Only thrice have I ventured to ask questions of consequence, scarcely yet answered by the pundits.

One regards Spectrum Analysis: How can we be sure that the lines indicative of gases and other elements are not mainly due to the emanations from our own globe, swathed as it is by more than forty miles of an atmosphere impregnated by its own salts and acids in aerial solution?
May we not be deducing false conclusions as to the varying lights of stars and nebulae, if all the while to our vision they are as it were clouded by our own smoke?
Telescopes have to pierce so thick a stratum of earth's aura and ether that it is expectable they, would show us only our own composites in those of other worlds.

The spectra are varied, I know, but so may be our wrappings of atmosphere from one night to another.

Let this ignorant query suffice about Dr.
Huggins' great discovery.
Again, I certainly (after some knowledge of strange facts) could have wished that Mr.Crookes's philosophical spiritualism had met with a more patient hearing than Dr.Carpenter or Mr.Huxley offered at the time; and that Faraday's clumsy mechanical refutation of table-turning had not been considered so conclusive.

For there really are "more things in heaven and earth, Horatio," &c., than even your omniscience is aware of; and without pinning faith on Madame Blavatsky, or Mr.Hume, or any other wonder-worker from America or Thibet, there doubtless are petty miracles in what is called spiritualism (possibly some form of electricity) that demand more scrutiny than our materialists will have the patience to vouchsafe: I for one believe in human testimony even as to the miraculous.
For a third and last inquiry: justly indignant at the horrors of Continental vivisection, and especially in our own humane England at Dr.
Ferrier's red-hot wires thrust into live monkeys' brains, I have often vainly asked _cui bono_ such terrible cruelty?
The highest authorities are at variance with each other as to the practical utility in human therapeutics of experiments upon agonised brutes; but all must be agreed that, so far as morals are concerned, vivisection only hardens the heart and sears the feelings and conscience of doctors who may surround the dying-bed of our dearest, and very possibly make capital of peculiar symptoms in their patient, by experiments transferred from dogs and rabbits to himself! Single votes are useless against the annual list of selected candidates, or I for one would have at all inconvenience testified both at Oxford and in the Royal Society against the election of a certain Professor whose glory lies in vivisection.
For an appropriate end to these discursive sentences, let me add this poetic morsel in my own vein.