lous
discovery, that any kind of molecules are affected in a
special manner by molecules of the same kind, though
situated in the most distant regions of space.

It requires but one step more for the admission that psychical
communications may be established between an inhabitant of Mars and an
inhabitant of the earth.

We are often asked what all these studies amount to. That is still
unknown. If they should end in a scientific proof of the existence and
immortality of the soul, these investigations would forthwith surpass
in value all other human sciences put together, without a single
exception.

It must be acknowledged that this reason is a sufficient authorization
for us not to despise this class of researches. But this argument is
needless. These investigations relate to the unknown, and that reason
is all-sufficient.

Did Galvani in examining the convulsions of his frogs, have any idea
of the immense, the prodigious, the universal part which electric
science was to perform in less than a century? Denis Papin and Robert
Fulton, Benjamin Franklin and James Watts, Jouffroy and Daguerre,--all
the inventors, all the searchers after truth,--were they wrong in
losing themselves in their pursuit of the unknown? It is such men who
cause the advance of humanity. It is to them mankind owes its
progress.

If it were proved, we say, that there exists outside of us, and even
within us, an immaterial and spiritual force, which eludes the known
processes of nature, and the acknowledged laws of life,--and which
reveals itself by other processes and other laws, which do not
supplant the first, but take an equal place beside them, this new
knowledge might enlighten somewhat the shadows which now conceal the
great secret of the origin and destiny of such poor beings as
ourselves.

First of all, let us seek the truth. To be sure, Taine has written
very wittily: "I never thought that a truth could be of any practical
use!" but we may not be of the same mind, and may think, on the
contrary, that the search for truth is the prime object of men's
intellectual existence.

THE SWISS AND AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONS,

BY W. D. McCRACKAN.

The study of federalism, as a system of government, has in recent
times become a favorite subject for constitutional writers. At present
the United States and the Dominion of Canada on this continent, the
newly constituted Australian Commonwealth at the Antipodes, and in
Eur