Last fall Mrs. John Hoffman, of Lewistown, Pa., bought some pumpkins and put them away for use in making pies. A short time ago she cut one of them open and was surprised to find a pumpkin patch growing inside. The seeds had all sprouted and were growing fine, lusty vines, some of the vines having leaves.
Still Home Comforts When all Coal Goes.
Coal will disappear from the earth in three hundred years, although there are seven and one-half trillion tons left. Then, instead of freezing to death or descending in one mad rush on the tropics, humanity will know a cleaner, more comfortable existence than ever.
Huge solar engines will gather the sun’s rays and transform them into heat, light, and power. Millions of horse power will be developed from waterfalls now unnoticed.
The farmer will guide an electric plow instead of a team of horses or a gasoline tractor. When the flat dweller yells down the speaking tube for more heat, the janitor of A. D. 2200 simply will throw a switch that regulates current coming perhaps clear across or under the Atlantic from the Sahara Desert.
The ideas belonged to Professor J. Paul Goode, of the University of Chicago until he gave them to an audience at Mandel Hall on a recent night. He is certain there will be no more coal in three hundred years, but equally sure some genius will have perfected by then all the wonders he described.
Seer Wins Freedom by Amazing Feat in Court.
Out of the mass of humbug and charlatanry about mind reading, fortune telling, clairvoyance, et cetera, there emerges an occasional definite fact apparently proving that the human intellect may possess psychic powers. A case in point is the exhibition of mind reading made by “Professor” Bert Reese in Judge Rosalsky’s court in New York, N. Y.
Arrested and previously convicted in a magistrate’s court for posing as a fortune teller, Reese strikingly demonstrated his possession of clairvoyant powers. He read names written on concealed slips of paper, gave the amount of the judge’s bank balance, and performed other feats showing familiarity with what was passing in the minds of his examiners.
Obviously, a man who can do these things under conditions making collusion impossible, shows himself endowed with mental gifts as rare as they are inexplainable. Washington Irving Bishop possessed them in even greater degree; older New Yorkers readily recall his extraordinary exhibitions of occult intelligence a quarter of a century ago.