PASCAL was a man of genius so high that it cannot be accounted for by the known laws of mental physiology. While still a child he developed a faculty for mathematics so extraordinary that his friends endeavored to check it, fearing his health would be destroyed by the incessant activity of his mind. Deprived of books, the boy of twelve began an independent investigation of the principles of mathematics and it is said that he “invented geometry anew.” In 1640, at the age of seventeen, he produced a famous “Treatise on Conic Sections,” and as long as he devoted his mind to mathematics no problem appeared too difficult for him. While still a youth, he seems to have thought out for himself the sum total of possible human achievement and to have been influenced by his conclusions to devote his mind to preparation for a more satisfactory existence. He became a devotee, and through at first he had occasional lapses into dissipation, he finally gave up the world and devoted his genius wholly to religion. Joining the Port Royalists, he wrote his famous “Provincial Letters” against the Jesuits. The greatness of his intellect does not fully appear, however, except in his “Penseés” first published in 1670. Out of these, it seems that he intended to construct a great theological work, but it is probably fortunate for the world that he did not do so. His “Thoughts” created a class for themselves in modern literature and they stand at the head of it. Sometimes the sudden flashes of genius in them have almost the force of a revelation. Pascal was born at Clermont-Ferrand, France, June 19th, 1623. He died at the age of thirty-nine, apparently exhausted by the incessant activity of his intellect. Such genius as his may be, as some suppose in spite of Lombroso, an approximation to the true race norm of intellectual sanity, but it is often fatal when its possessor gives it free rein at the expense of a body as sensitive and responsive as Pascal’s seems to have been.