In a well edited magazine the claims of Keely and the Keely motor find an advocate in a lengthy article, fully illustrated. Its author is still a fervid believer in Keely, just as there are to-day imaginative persons who accept Cagliostro. The “if” plays an important part in this article. Now that the unfortunate man is dead, and his humbuggery fully exposed, what earthly good can there be in an endeavor to resuscitate such absurd nonsense? The only thing peculiar about Keely’s talk, says his chronicler, was ‘that he called things by one name at one time and subsequently by another.” He had “a curious phraseology.” The English of this is that Keely was nothing else than a prodigious liar. Why mince words? What advantage can there be in disseminating false ideas? We have had lately a credulous set of people with money to burn, who invested their dollars in a company which was to get gold galore out of sea water. Quite as silly was a yarn lately told at length, with a picture of the manufactory, where the transmutation of metals, so it was told, was being actually carried on. You might take to that factory a cartload of old junk and have it changed into gold for you. The age of gullibility is ever present, and finds its vent in Christian Scientists and Keely motors. Both the immaterial and the material run into crazes, though in the present age it is comparatively easier to steal a man’s brains than to rifle his pockets.

Published: February 4, 1899
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