On Wednesday the British Association began at Bristol its annual conference. Sir William Crooks is president this year and there was much speculation as to whether he would ventilate his well-known belief in " psychic phenomena," or whether, in deference to the scepticism of all or most of the other great scientists of the day, he would ovate the subject. He had the cou of his convictions. He declared that he had nothing to withdraw from his previous utterances on the subject; and he made a lucid endeavour to treat scienti-tically the subject of telepathy, between which and the recently discovered wireless telegraphy he drew a somewhat striking comparison. But the main portion of his address was devoted to an eminently prac. tical and scientific enquiry into chemical means of increasing the wheat production of the country, that is, of getting a much larger yield of wheat per acre from the land under cultivation. To-day M. de Rougemont, the modern Robinson Crusoe" who is the great attraction of this year's gathering, is giving a history of his thirty ears' existence among the cannibals. There is a good deal of scepticism as to the truth of the story which he is unfolding in the pages of the Wide World Magazine; and no doubt it will be submitted to rigorous examination. At the same tung it is well t" remember that since the days of Marco Polo the traveller into new regions has nearly always, and generally with injustice, been denounced as a liar.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.