Feb. 3.
An American millionaire is having a yacht built and is fitting out an expedition to visit Easter Island, the lonely volcanic islet discovered by Roggeveen on Easter day, 1722, On this island are more than 500 stone images tanging in height from three to seventy feet and numerous stone houses with painted interiors and incised tablets written in an unknown language. The present inhabitants have no history and know nothing of the origin of these mionuments. This world's mystery that awaits solution and the explorers will open a fascinating chapter in archwology if they have the-good fortune to discover a key to this unknown script. The buildings bear a resemblance to the cyclopean remains of ancient walls in Greece which, legend says, were built by the vanished race of Pelasgians, though the Pelasgions themselves are still somewhat of a mystery.
There was evidently a time in the world's history when men and nations had a passion for building gigantic strictures of hewn and unhewn stones. To this period belong the pyramids of Egypt, the temples of Karnac and Baalbee and the Druidical circles to be found in Britain, such as Stonehenge and other remains of the same kind. It} seems as though an epidemic had swept the earth in an early period of its history when men were impelled to devote extraordinary labour and ingenuity to the construction of monolitic structures for some purpose which we can now only dimly conjecture. The most striking peculiarity is that the same craze should have overtaken people so widely scattered at Something nearly the same time and that, the period having passed, their successors made no effort to copy, or even to make use of, the monuments built by their forerunners. It reminds one of the incredible labours of the beetles described by M. Fabre. These build deep tunnels and store them with food for a progeny they will: never' see, for, the tunnel being ended and eggs laid, the beetle, worn out by its task, lies down and dies before the rub is hatched. A mysterious, blind impulse is laid upon them and unreasoning, and unresting they accomplish their appointed task and pass out of existence,. It leads us to wonder whether there be some undiscovered law at work which links together the thought of widely separated individuals and, like a stern taskmaster, sets them an appointed task. Taking our own age, for example, we see instances of the same kind happening, which are diffi-' cult to explain on the hypothesis of pure chance. The best known, perhaps, is that of the discovery of the principle of development of species by natural selection. Charles Darwin had been working on the theory for years, had amassed a multitude of facts and, in a slow deliberate way, was arranging his material for Publication when he received a packet from his friend, Alfred Russel Wallace, then collecting zoological specimens in Malaya, and found that brother scientist had reached the same conclusion and sent him a paper to read to the Linnaan Society on the theory which he thought, was his own discovery. Two men, poles apart, had, unknown to each other, hit on the same epoch-making principle. John Adams of Cambridge discovered that the cause of the irregulariies in the motion of Uranus was due tothe existence of the then unknown planet Neptune and indicated the place in which the planet might be found, He sent his paper elucidating his discovery to the Astronomer Royal at Greenwich in October, but that gentleman delayed to publish it and, in November, Leverrier, in France announced his discovery of the same planet. Still later, and quite in our own time, we have had the discovery of the electric light made by Swan in England and Edison in America, in proof whereof we have the Ediswan lamp, *commemorating the labours of both inventors. These later instances are not so striking for the problems cited were well-known and engaging the attention of scientists in various countries and keen minds were directed towards a solution, But. similarity of unspoken thought is a very common pheno omenon, A man makes a remark to his friend and gets the reply,"I was just thinking the same thing." Undoubtedly there is such a thing as telepathic exchange of thought though the law of thought transference is as yet unknown. It opens to ws a wide field of speculation. Perhaps some day the mystery will be solved. Some genius will reveal to us the principle by which the thought of one person can be instantly revealed to another at the opposite end of the earth even as now the living voice can be broadcast, not only around the world, but far out into the fathomless depths of space were there an ear there to listen to it, It seems fantasy tic but is not more marvellous than some of the things that are to-day commonplace would have seemed to men living not move than a generation ago.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.