Psychology and Lie-chology.

“There is nothing new under the sun,” is a slogan adopted by used-car salesmen, and it is probably the most truthful truth they have ever been guilty of uttering. Mind manipulation certainly is no new thing. The serpent practised it with marked success on Eve, and people have been giving other people pieces of

“The vanished youth of a senile breakfast egg.”

their mind ever since. But mind control in its more modern and virulent form is known as Psychology. There are numerous brands of psychology not registered under the Pure Foods Act. For instance, there is business psychology, child psychology, plumbing psychology, boxing psychology, and a million others, all labelled “new thought,” which nevertheless are merely old thoughts disguised in horn-rims.

Business psychology teaches the use of the £ s. d. ray for disclosing the weak spots in your adversary's psycho-financial complex, and enables you to duck under his guard and upset his credit balance with an underhand jab to his chamber of commerce.

Boxing psychology is similar in some respects, but when practising the latter phase of the noble art, you look into the depths of your opponent's eyes and read there the message of his soul, which is usually an advance note as to where he intends to deliver the next wallop. It is a mistake, however, to gaze too closely or too long into the windows of his soul, for he may decide that the time is ripe to deliver his message by hand, and knock you for ten, twenty, thirty, forty—or even fifty seconds, into the land of shadow-sparring.

Child psychology is a finer and gentler art than either of those aforementioned. Its mastery enables you to determine instinctively what it is that causes the infant Samuel to hiccough like a shunting engine with steam pressure on the dome, and to convolute in the region of his Plunket system. Advanced pupils can even quieten the discordant vibrations in the infant Samuel's screech box or hooter, without resorting to the old-fashioned method of stunning him with a slipper, or leaving him with the neighbours, on the pretext of a sudden death in the family or something even flimsier.

Plumbing psychology, it seems, has not advanced appreciably during the last decade or two, but I believe that, by forming a psychic circle of one's most muscular relatives, armed with red-hot soldering irons and flame-throwing blow-lamps, it is possible to influence the pipeological impulses of members of the profession in such a manner that their subconscious metallurgy is prompted to action—slowly at first, but gaining impetus during the fourth and fifth weeks of their efforts to instal a new washer in the bathroom tap.

And now, having exhausted all unreliable sources of information concerning psychological highcockalorum, I am constrained to practise the psychology of silence.

“will power that wilted.”