peculiar jargon that school-children have adopted
from time immemorial when discussing their
affairs with favourite companions. The second
department includes the formation and use of
cypher alphabets, often invented and modified
with great ingenuity, but always capable of
being made out when there is any real necessity
for doing so. The third method is a kind
of short-hand, but the key to this, like that of
cyphers, and also like that of many written
languages almost lost, can be with singular
ease discovered, owing to the much greater
abundance of certain letters and words in every
language than others, and an invariable and
inevitable law thus obtained. All these methods
or departments of secret communication, curious
and ingenious enough at the time, may now be
said to have little value, and possess no general
interest.

While, however, describing these familiar and
not very useful secrets, our author suggests
others far less probable, as it might seem at the
time, but which have been found more useful
and practicable. Thus he speaks of "a flying
chariot than which imagination itself cannot
conceive any one more useful, since by this
means a man may have as free a passage as a
bird, which is not hindered by the highest walls,
or the deepest rivers and trenches, or the most
watchful sentinels." It is true that the notion
of sailing through the air like birds is of very
ancient date, and that Roger Bacon states that
he has heard of a machine to accomplish this
purpose. But it seems certain that no human
being ever actually ascended far into the air in
any floating balloon till, in 1783, the brothers
Montgolfier made their first successful experiment
near Lyons, in France. It would be difficult,
however, to find words to express in smaller
space, or with greater reference to the modern
contrivances of balloons, all that these machines
can perform, than those made use of in the
above short extract. Balloons, indeed, have not
yet been made useful, except on a small scale,
in war, but that is because they cannot yet be
guided. When this is secured, the prophetic
description will be perfect.

On the subject of rapid communication of
news generally, we find in this same work a
reference to "three saturnine angels and certain
images by which in the space of twenty-four
hours a man may be informed of news from any
part of the world." If the saturnine angels or
messengers be translated to mean metallic wires,
and the images the dial-plates of telegraphic
instruments, all that is apparent in the electric
telegraph would be described, but as the nature
of the power or influence is not alluded to, the
hint is hardly sufficient. Much more distinct,
however, is the sentence that follows shortly
after, when "certain fabulous relations that
concern secret and swift conveyances," are thus
described. "Let there be two needles provided
of an equal length and business, being both of
them touched with the same loadstone. Let
the letters of the alphabet be placed in the
circles on which they are moved, as the points
of the compass under the needle of the mariner's
chart. Let the friend that is to travel
take one of them with him, first agreeing upon
the days and hours wherein they should confer
together, at which times, if one of them move
the needle of his instrument to any letter of
the alphabet, the other needle, by a sympathy,
will move unto the same letter in the other
instrument, though they be never so far distant.
And thus, by several motions of the needle to
the letters they may easily make up any words
or sense which they have a mind to express."

Dr. Wilkins, while he thus describes what he
was informed could be done, evidently has grave
doubts as to its possibility. He observes, first,
"that every natural agent is supposed to have
some certain sphere, which determines its
activity," and therefore that this sympathy
between distant magnets was improbable.
Secondly, he says, that "magnetical operations do
not arise from mere sympathy, but from such a
diffusion of these magnetical qualities through
the medium that they may be continued from
the agent to the patient." Still he describes
and refers to it, as to a fact, and it is not a little
curious to see in this suggestion of a result
only recently attained, how completely the
imagination has gone ahead of the observing and
reflective faculties. The principle involved in
all practical telegraphic operations, that of
making soft iron magnetic by passing through
it a galvanic current, and the facility thus
obtained of making and unmaking a magnet at
will is not referred to in these speculations,
and is altogether a modern invention. The
communication of magnetic currents by metallic
wires, although exceedingly useful and
generally adopted, is not so essential, and thus one
very small step, and one only, really separates
this suggestion, doubtful even to the suggestor,
from the marvellous realisation of our own day.

There is something exceedingly interesting in
looking back to the infancy of science and
tracing the foreshadowing of great inventions
in the mind of an ingenious man, whose
imaginative and poetic intellect was enabled to
overleap the mechanical difficulties that for centuries
prevented the successful carrying out into practice
of the ideas he entertained. It may be very
doubtful whether such guesses and vague fancies
really assist the more matter-of-fact discoverer
in after times, but there is no doubt that they
prepare the minds of men, and keep alive an
excitement which may often tend in its operation
to promote discovery.

One word more with regard to the apparent
vagueness of the accounts, and even the
impossibility of obtaining a fairly accurate notion of
the details, when such men as Bishop Wilkins
set forth their ideal views of what science is
doing or will do. Although what they wrote
seems to us now so unpractical, we must not
conclude that men of this stamp were without
wisdom and honesty, or that they did not exert
themselves to the utmost, according to their
knowledge and powers, for the improvement and
enlightenment of mankind. They had but few