a previous 'expectancy.' Of this I can give you a very striking illustration in a case narrated by Dr. Tuke. A lady, whose mind had been a good deal occupied on the subject of drinking-fountains, was walking from Penryn to Falmouth, and thought she saw in the road a newly-erected fountain, with the inscription, 'If any man thirst, let him come hither and drink.' Some time afterwards, on mentioning the fact with pleasure to the daughters of a gentleman whom she supposed to have erected it, she was greatly surprised to learn from them that no such drinking-fountain existed; and on subsequently repairing to the spot, she found nothing but a few stones, which constituted the foundation on which her expectant imagination had built an ideal superstructure.

The same may be said with regard to the control exercised over the muscular movements of the Biologised 'subject,' by the persuasion that he must or that he cannot perform a particular action. His hands being placed in contact with one another, he is assured that he cannot separate them; and they remain as if firmly glued together, in spite of all his apparent efforts to draw them apart. Or, a hand being held up before him, he is assured that he cannot succeed in striking it; and not only does all his power seem inadequate to the performance of this simple action, but it actually is so, as long as he remains convinced of its entire impossibility. So I have seen a strong man chained down to his chair, prevented from stepping over a stick on the floor, or obliged to remain almost doubled upon himself in a

stooping position, by the assurance that he could not move. On the other hand, an extraordinary power may be called forth in any set of muscles—as in Hypnotised subjects-by the assurance that the action to be performed by them may be executed with the greatest facility. This, again, is quite conformable to ordinary experience; the assurance that we can perform some feat of strength or dexterity, nerving us to the effort; whilst our power is weakened by our own doubts of success, still more by the unfavourable impression produced by a confident prediction of failure. It is only needed for the mind to become completely 'possessed' by the one or the other conviction, for it to produce the bodily results of this kind which I have over and over again witnessed.

Now the phenomena of the 'Biological' condition seem to me of peculiar significance, in relation to a large class of those which are claimed as manifestations of a supposed 'Spiritual' agency. When a number of persons of that "concentrative and imaginative turn of mind" which predisposes them to this condition, sit for a couple of hours (especially if in the dark) with the expectation of some extraordinary occurrence, such as the rising and floating in the air, either of the human body, or of chairs or tables, without any physical agency; the crawling of live lobsters over their persons; the contact of the hands, the sound of the voices, or the visible luminous shapes,' of their

1 I put aside the question of fraud, to which recourse has doubtless often been had for the production of these phenomena; being satisfied that they are often genuinely subjective.'

departed friends, it is perfectly conformable to scientific probability that they should pass more or less completely (like Reichenbach's 'sensitives') into a state which is neither waking nor sleeping, but between the two, in which they see, hear, or feel by touch, anything they have been led to expect will present itself. And the accordance of their testimony, in regard to such occurrences, is only such as is produced by the community of the dominant idea' with which they are all 'possessed,' a community of which history furnishes any amount of strangely-varied examples. And thus it becomes obvious that the testimony of a single cool-headed sceptic, who asserts that nothing extraordinary has really occurred, should be accepted as more trustworthy than that of any number of believers, who have, as it were, created the sensorial result by their anticipation of it.

PENDULE EXPLORATEUR.

I have now to show you that the like 'expectancy' can also produce movements of various kinds through the instrumentality of the nervo-muscular apparatus, without the least consciousness on the part of its subject of his being himself the instrument of their performance; a physiological fact which is the key to the whole mystery of Table-turning and Table-talking. I very well remember the prevalence, in my schoolboy days, of a belief that when a ring, a button, or any other small body, suspended by a string over the end of the finger, was brought near the outside or

inside of a glass tumbler, it would strike the hour of the day against its surface; and the experiment certainly succeeded in the hands of several of my schoolfellows, who tried it in all good faith, getting up in the middle of the night to test it, in entire ignoranceas they declared-of the real time. But, as was pointed out by M. Chevreul, who investigated this subject in a truly scientific spirit more than forty years ago,' it is impossible by any voluntary effort to keep the hand absolutely still for a length of time in the position required; an involuntary tremulousness is always observable in the suspended body; and if the attention be fixed on it with the expectation that its vibrations will take a definite direction, they are very likely to do so. But their persistence in that direction is found to last only so long as they are guided by the sight of the operator; the oscillations at once and entirely losing their constancy, if he closes or turns away his eyes. Thus it became obvious that, in the striking of the hour, the influence which determines the number of strokes is really the knowledge or suspicion present to the mind of the operator, which involuntarily and unconsciously directs the action of his muscles; and the same rationale was applied by M. Chevreul to other cases in which this pendule explorateur (the use of which can be traced back to a very remote date) has been appealed to for answers to questions of very diverse character.2

1 See his letter to M. Ampère in the Revue des Deux Mondes, Mai, 1833.

When, however, 'Odyle' came to the front, and the world of curious but unscientific enquirers was again possessed' by the idea of an unknown and mysterious agency, capable of manifesting itself in an unlimited variety of ways, the pendule explorateur was brought into vogue, under the name of Odometer, by Dr. Herbert Mayo,' who investigated its action with a great show of scientific precision; starting, however, with the foregone conclusion that its oscillations were directed by the hypothetical 'odyle,' and altogether ignoring the mental participation of the operator, whom he supposed to be as passive as a thermometer or a balance. By a series of elaborate experiments, he convinced himself that the direction and extent of the oscillations could be altered, either by a change in the nature of the substances placed beneath the ' odometer,' or by the contact of the hand of a person of the opposite sex, or even of the other hand of the experimenter himself, with that from which it was suspended. And he gradually reduced his result to a series of definite laws, which he regarded as having the same constancy as those of Physics or Chemistry. Unfortunately, however, other experimenters, who worked out the enquiry with similar perseverance and good faith, arrived at such different results, that it soon came to be obvious that what Astronomical observers call the 'personal equation' of the individual has a very large share in determining them. A very intelligent medical friend of my own, then residing abroad, wrote me long letters full of the detailed. On the Truths contained in Popular Superstitions, 1851.