s sweeping over the long swells of the
Mediterranean, I heard Brande lecture for the second time. It was a
fitting interlude between his first and third addresses. I might
classify them thus--the first, critical; the second, constructive; the
third, executive. His third speech was the last he made in the world.

We were assembled in the saloon. It would have been pleasanter on the
upper deck, owing to the heat, but the speaker could not then have been
easily heard in the noise of the wind and waves. I could scarcely
believe that it was Brande who arose to speak, so changed was his
expression. The frank scepticism, which had only recently degenerated
into a cynicism, still tempered with a half kindly air of easy
superiority, was gone. In its place there was a look of concentrated
and relentless purpose which dominated the man himself and all who saw
him. He began in forcible and direct sentences, with only a faintly
reminiscent eloquence which was part of himself, and from which he could
not without a conscious effort have freed his style. But the whole
bearing of the man had little trace in it of the dilettante academician
whom we all remembered.

"When I last addressed this Society," he began, "I laboured under a
difficulty in arriving at ultimate truth which was of my own
manufacture. I presupposed, as you will remember, the indestructibility
of the atom, and, in logical consequence I was bound to admit the
conservation of suffering, the eternity of misery. But on that evening
many of my audience were untaught in the rudiments of ultimate thought,
and some were still sceptical of the _bona fides_ of our purpose, and
our power to achieve its object. To them, in their then ineptitude, what
I shall say now would have been unintelligible. For in the same way that
the waves of light or sound exceeding a certain maximum can not be
transferred to the brain by dull eyes and ears, my thought pulsations
would have escaped those auditors by virtue of their own
irresponsiveness. To-night I am free from the limitation which I then
suffered, because there are none around me now who have not sufficient
knowledge to grasp what I shall present.

"You remember that I traced for you the story of evolution in its
journey from the atom to the star. And I showed you that the hypothesis
of the indestructibility of the atom was simply a creed of cruelty writ
large. I now proceed on the lines of true science to show you how that
hypothesis