government receives a mortal shock. If a court or legisla ture may thus annul the authority of the fundamental law, the conclusion is unavoidable that it is nothing better than waste-paper. The men who abet, who enact, who enforce such legislation are making the way for arbitrary imperial government, and are more dangerous to liberty than anarchists themselves.

The pretexts for the obnoxious measures are: the protection of the people, the regulation of medical and surgical practise, and the elevation of the professional standard. These are little better than plausible fictions. Medical practise is no more successful than it was fifty years ago, or when doctors were more illiterate. Education never made a skilful physician where God and Nature did not. There is more show than fact in any boasted bettering of the matter. So far from protecting the people, the pretext is simply trumped up by third-rate doctors and shyster lawyers, for the purpose of levying more and larger fees. The whole of it is odious to the people, as a referendum would quickly show.

Attempts have been made to institute a persecution of the Christian Scientists. A coroner in New Jersey has recently held a man for the action of the Grand Jury because he refused to have a physician for his child suffering from diphtheria. Suppose that parent be indicted for manslaughter for acting up to his convictions: would not a physician who failed to treat such a patient successfully be guilty of a like crime? Have medical men been so skilful with diphtheria as to entitle them to much confidence?

There is another case in Rhode Island. There the Christian Scientist is the object of attack. He proposes to carry the case to the court of last resort. A prosecution has also been begun in Massachusetts, and the same policy proposed. This would test the question now in issue

whether the government is as Abraham Lincoln described it, or a government of doctors by doctors for doctors.

Of the right of an individual to make his own contracts there can be no rational question. He may engage whomsoever he pleases to cure him; and the person, having rendered a meritorious service, has a moral right to a reasonable compensation. Any statute interfering with this is a usurpation. The pretext that Mental Science, or even Christian Science, is a fallacy, is not entitled to respect. "Regular medicine," as its votaries arrogantly style it, has no such superior skill, no such exactitude in scientific attainment, no such moral or professional excellence, as to give it any title to dictate. In fact, Jesus Christ, as described in the Gospels, if now in the world, would be apt to be imprisoned, if not crucified afresh, under the current medical legislation.

MIND creates every science and every art, and therefore the science of mind-Psychology-is the Science of the sciences; and therefore the art of using the mind and the art of getting more mind-Psychurgy-is the Art of arts. Mind is life. Life is not something different from mind. The life of a cell is its mind. The activities of a cell are psychologic activities, and therefore the regulation of the psychologic activities of cells and of multicells is the basis of the long-looked-for fundamental law of cure. Therein lies the key to the mystery of disease and pain and evil, and therein, also, lies the Ariadne's clue to health and happiness and success.Professor Elmer Gates.

THE power of the mind over the body is universally conceded by advanced thinkers. That this power is so great as to enable the trained mind to overcome every form of disease either in one's self or in another person, whether present or absent, is a fact not generally known at this time. We are just beginning to grasp the tremendous truth that there is a Science of Thought, and that the laws governing it can be known and scientifically applied.-Franc Garstin.

THE UTILITY OF PALMISTRY.

BY WILLIAM LESLIE FRENCH.

The principle of causation, as we ascend the animal series, has made man the highest exponent of potential and kinetic energy in the realms of bodily and psychic life. Man is a concrete expression of the universe; and in order clearly to apprehend the human species it is necessary to know what proportions-ancestral influences, climate, and environment-contribute to his passive and active powers.

There is a reciprocal dependence between the phenomena of mind and of body; and especially may it be said that the autonomous mind, the loftiest product of creative force, empowers the automatically acting brain to use as an infallible guide to its operations that part of the body most susceptible to moral conductivity and excitability. The testimony of physiologists is unanimous in declaring that the tactile corpuscles are composed of connective tissue surrounding minute threads of nervous matter, and that "these special end-organs are most constant and numerous in those parts most employed in active, discriminating touch."

There are more nerves in the hand than in any other part of the body, and this complicated nerve-plexus becomes at birth the register of the varied impulses that are reflected and transmitted coördinately to and from the three nerve-centers by the "luminiferous ether." The hand is a special peripheral condenser of the sensory nervecommotions, and gives abundant and accurate evidence of the changes resulting not only from external and internal

stimuli, but also those due to organic and temperamental modifications.

We know that from a fragment of bone an entire animal can be reconstructed, and from its formation a knowledge of its modes of life and its habits can be ascertained. In like manner, it is reasonable to assume that, from an examination of the hand, the man (his habits and characteristics) can be reproduced.

To the importance and superiority of the hand as the repository whence issue the bulletins of life and death, the nations of the far East, of Egypt and Arabia, Rome and Greece, for generations have borne witness. With reference to this, Aristotle, in his history of animals, says: "The hand appears to be not one organ, but many; it is, as it were, the organ of organs." And lines have not been traced in the hands without cause, but evidently emanate from the vagaries of personality.

Among the scholars and philosophers of eminence that have studied the art of chiromancy are Plato, Albertus Magnus, Ptolemy, Avincenna, Averroës, Taisnier, Pertuchio, Jean Belot, Galen, and many others-all of whom have bequeathed to posterity commentaries, treatises, and brochures upon the relation that exists between the hand and the individual life, which attest the high encomia they bestow upon this science. Yet, during the sixteen hundred years that followed the inception of the Christian era, chirosophy became so thoroughly tainted with superstition, magic, and charlatanism that at the close of the seventeenth century it was utterly condemned by the Church.

It is to C. S. D'Arpentigny that we are indebted for a system called chirognomy, based upon the truth that "God, in giving us men different instincts, has logically given us hands of diversified form; and it would argue a very weak idea of the prevision of the omnipotent Creator

to believe that the instruments with which he has furnished us are not appropriated by the variety of their forms to other variety of our intelligences." The limitations of this method extend only to the formation of the handits shape, the finger-tips, etc.-as revealing the tendencies and aptitudes of mind and body. Adrien Des Barrolles, however, developed a system of divination, from the terminal lines and signs in the hand, whereby events, both past and future, could be determined.

Of the latter-day palmists, Heron-Allen and Rosa Baughan have passed through the crucible of reason and experience the various systems heretofore acknowledged as preeminent. By careful observation of physical and psychic phenomena they have established a series of laws that, in their application, are both useful and valuable for interpreting the mysteries of human life. "To foretell to a man the events of his life, from the aspects of his hand," says Honoré de Balzac, "is not a thing more strange for him that has the qualities of a seer than it is to tell a soldier that he will fight."

Chiromantic revelation is that vision given to man by virtue of which he may understand the extent, power, mag. nitude, and subtlety of all forces that fulfil in him, as a composite being, their operations. "We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen, and ye receive not our witness" (John iii. 11), is an utterance that savants and philosophers, anatomists and physicians, have reëchoed until now.

But talk is cheap; actions speak; and the virile quality that organic changes give to the hand are at present covertly acknowledged by many who formerly repudiated the idea that any significance could be attached to such indications. Still, physicians generally have recognized that the hands, on account of their sensitiveness, record the evidence that disease (or disorder) produces