And in fact some French trials of this type, and an aggregate of 5,500 carried out by the American Society for Psychical Research,1 give a result only very slightly in excess of the most probable number.

§ 8. I may now pass to another class of experiments, in which the impression transferred was almost certainly of the visual sort, inasmuch as any verbal description of the object would require a group of words too numerous to present any clear and compact auditory character. An object of this kind is supplied by any irregular figure or arrangement of lines which suggests nothing in particular. We have had two remarkably successful series of experiments, extending over many days, in which the idea of such a figure has been telepathically transferred from one mind to another. A rough diagram being first drawn by one of the investigating Committee, the agent proceeded to concentrate his attention on it, or on the memory which he retained of it; and in a period varying from a few seconds to a few minutes the percipient was able to reproduce the diagram, or a close approximation to it, on paper. No contact was permitted, except on a few occasions, which, on that very account, we should not present as crucial; and in order to preclude the agent from giving unconscious hints - e.g., by drawing with his finger on the table or making movements suggestive of the figure in the air - he was kept out of the percipient's sight.

1 Report by Professors J. M. Peirce and E. C. Pickering, in the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, vol. i., p. 19. This Society has also carried out 12,130 trials with the 10 digits - which similarly gave a result only slightly in excess of theoretic probability. But here the digits to be thought of by the agent were not taken throughout in a purely accidental order, but in regularly reclining decads, in each of which each digit occurred once; and consequently the later guesses (both within the same decad and in successive decads) might easily be biassed by the earlier ones. This system may lead to interesting statistics in other ways; but to give thought-transference fair play in experiments with a limited number of objects, it seems essential that the order of selection shall be entirely haphazard, and that the guesser's mind shall be quite uuembarrassed by the notion of a scheme.

Of the two series mentioned, the second is evidentially to be preferred. For in the first series the agent, as well as the percipient, was always the same person; and we recognise this as pro tanto an objection. Not indeed that the simple hypothesis of collusion would at all meet the difficulties of the case. Faith in the power of a secret code must be carried to the verge of superstition, before it will be easy to believe that auditory signals, the material for which (as I pointed out above) is limited to the faintest variations in the signaller's-method of breathing, can fully and faithfully describe a complicated diagram; especially when the variations, imperceptible to the closest observation of the bystanders, would have to penetrate to the intelligence of a percipient whose head was enveloped in bandage, bolster-case, and blanket. But in spite of all, suspicion will, reasonably or unreasonably, attach to results which are, so to speak, a monopoly of two particular performers. In our second series of experiments this objection was obviated. There were two percipients, and a considerable group of agents, each of whom, when alone with one or other of the percipients, was successful in transferring his impression.

It is this series, therefore, that I select for fuller description.

We owe these remarkable experiments to the sagacity and energy of Mr. Malcolm Guthrie, J.P., of Liverpool. At the beginning of 1883, Mr. Guthrie happened to read an article on thought-transference in a magazine, and though completely sceptical, he determined to make some trials on his own account. He was then at the head of an establishment which gives employment to many hundreds of persons; and he was informed by a relative who occupied a position of responsibility in this establishment that she had witnessed remarkable results in some casual trials made by a group of his employees after business hours. He at once took the matter into his own hands, and went steadily, but cautiously, to work. He restricted the practice of the novel accomplishment to weekly meetings; and he arranged with his friend, Mr. James Birchall, the hon. secretary of the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society, that the latter should make a full and complete record of every experiment made. Mr. Guthrie thus describes the proceedings: -

"I have had the advantage of studying a series of experiments ab ovo. I have witnessed the genuine surprise which the operators and the 'subjects' have alike exhibited at their increasing successes, and at the results of our excursions into novel lines of experiment. The affair has not been the discovery of the possession of special powers, first made and then worked up by the parties themselves for gain or glory. The experimenters in this case were disposed to pass the matter over altogether as one of no moment, and only put themselves at my disposal in regard to experiments in order to oblige me. The experiments have all been devised and conducted by myself and Mr. Birchall, without any previous intimation of their nature, and could not possibly have been foreseen. In fact they have been to the young ladies a succession of surprises. No set of experiments of a similar nature has ever been more completely known from its origin, or more completely under the control of the scientific observer".

I must pass over the record of the earlier experiments, where the ideas transferred were of colours, geometrical figures, cards, and visible objects of all sorts, which the percipient was to name - these being similar in kind, though on the whole superior in the proportion of successes, to those already described.1 The reproduction of diagrams was introduced in October, 1883, and in that and the following month about 150 trials were made. The whole series has been carefully mounted and preserved by Mr. Guthrie. No one could look through them without perceiving that the hypothesis of chance or guess-work is out of the question; that in most instances some idea, and in many a complete idea, of the original must, by whatever means, have been present in the mind of the person who made the reproduction. In Mr. Guthrie's words:-