prediction in
an article in "The Forum" that writing (in the mechanical sense) would
become a lost art, and that the people of future centuries would point
to us as "the ancients," who communicated our ideas by means of this
slow and clumsy process. According to Doctor Hale's vision, the writing
of all this present period would come to be regarded in much the same
light as that in which we look at the Egyptian hieroglyphics or the
papyrus. At that time the phonograph, if invented, was not in any way
brought to the practical perfection of the present, and telepathy was
more a theory than an accepted fact; but Doctor Hale has the prophetic
cast of mind, and already his theory is more in the light of probability
than that of mere possibility. The demands of modern life absolutely
require the development of some means of communication that shall
obviate the necessity of the present laborious means of handwriting.
There is needed the mechanism that shall transfer the thought in the
mind to some species of record without the intervention of the hand.
Whether the phonograph can be popularized to meet this need; whether
some still finer means that photograph thought shall be evolved, remains
to be seen. Thought is already photographed in the ether, but whether
this image can be transferred to a material medium is the question.
That telepathy shall yet come to be so well understood; its laws
formulated as to bring it within the range of the definite sciences,
there can be no doubt; but this result can only attend a higher
development of the spiritual power of humanity. In its present status
telepathy is seen as a result of wholly unconscious and unanalyzed
processes that open a new region of life and a new range of
possibilities. It is the discovery of a new keyboard, so to speak, in
the individual, enabling him to still more "live in thought," and to
"act with energies that are immortal." Science is continually revealing
the truth that the world, the solar system, the infinite universes are
all created as the theatre of man's evolutionary development. As Emerson
so truly says, "the world is the perennial miracle which the soul
worketh."

"The Discovery of the Future" was the title of an interesting lecture by
Mr. H. G. Wells, given in London early in 1901, before the Royal
Institute, in which the subject was speculatively discussed, and in the
course of his lecture Mr. Wells said:--

"Along certain lines, with certain l