Better Than Men

Concerning them I have no theory whatever, and avow emphatically an entire disbelief in their sometimes alleged supernatural origin. That, for the present a

time has arrived when the old fields, now almost sacred groves, where superstition has taken root and blossomed, are about to be explored. The almost omnipotent search-light of science

ed the progress of scientific achievement, through the last half of the Nineteenth Century, must believe that, within the 189 next like period, the visible manifestations of s

the intelligent it is regarded as a subtle natural force coming from the universal laboratory of boundless nature and as unending as time itself. In electricity, as in many other manifestations of the forces of natu

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sources. Superstition must certainly fall before the great and impartial sweep of modern research. In at least one direction, the battle will be of long duration, but at the end of the conflict, the vicious old fabric coined out of ages of falseh

culminating 191 triumph of scientific achievement and the crowning glory of human effort in the in

ime were, I believe without exception, descendants from the early English colonists of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. They were an orderly, law-abiding, indus

t may be truly said of them that, from an academic or bookish standpoint, they were educated and enlightened only to a limited extent. Each household had its cupboard of books brought from “below,” and they retained in their memories an interesting stock of historic traditions and patriotic anecdotes, m

ves of my particular period. Among them was a belief in the misfortunes likely to attend new undertakings begun on Friday; they had a perfect reliance in the ill ending of any enterprise connected with the number thirteen; and it was rank heresy for any one not to believe in

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