been made recently in the physiology of the brain. I saw a
paragraph the other day about Digby's theory, and Browne Faber's
discoveries. Theories and discoveries! Where they are standing
now, I stood fifteen years ago, and I need not tell you that I
have not been standing still for the last fifteen years. It
will be enough if I say that five years ago I made the discovery
that I alluded to when I said that ten years ago I reached the
goal. After years of labour, after years of toiling and groping
in the dark, after days and nights of disappointments and
sometimes of despair, in which I used now and then to tremble
and grow cold with the thought that perhaps there were others
seeking for what I sought, at last, after so long, a pang of
sudden joy thrilled my soul, and I knew the long journey was at
an end. By what seemed then and still seems a chance, the
suggestion of a moment's idle thought followed up upon familiar
lines and paths that I had tracked a hundred times already, the
great truth burst upon me, and I saw, mapped out in lines of
sight, a whole world, a sphere unknown; continents and islands,
and great oceans in which no ship has sailed (to my belief)
since a Man first lifted up his eyes and beheld the sun, and the
stars of heaven, and the quiet earth beneath. You will think
this all high-flown language, Clarke, but it is hard to be
literal. And yet; I do not know whether what I am hinting at
cannot be set forth in plain and lonely terms. For instance,
this world of ours is pretty well girded now with the telegraph
wires and cables; thought, with something less than the speed
of thought, flashes from sunrise to sunset, from north to south,
across the floods and the desert places. Suppose that an
electrician of today were suddenly to perceive that he and his
friends have merely been playing with pebbles and mistaking them