The following case, received in September, 1885, from Mrs. Wilson, of Westal, Cheltenham, is interesting as an apparent victory of "thought-reading " over " muscle-reading." A group of five "willers," one of whom was in contact with the would-be percipient, were to concentrate their minds on the desire that the latter should sit down to the piano and strike the middle C. Had she done so, the result would have been worth little; but this was what happened: -

"When A. I. entered blindfolded - her hand in the hand of B., held over the forehead - M. A. W. was possessed with the desire to will her, without bodily contact, to come to her and give her a kiss on the forehead, and she at once exerted (unknown to the others) all her will to achieve this object. A. I. came slowly up to M. A. W., till she stood quite close, touching her, and commenced bending down towards her, when M. A. W., thinking it was hardly fair to succeed against the other 'willers,' tried to reverse her will, and with intense effort willed A. I. to turn away and not give the intended kiss. Slowly A. I. raised her head, stood a moment still, then turned in another direction towards the piano, but not near it, and sat down in an armchair. A few seconds after she said: ' I can't feel any impression now, nor any wish to do anything' She was released from her bandage and questioned as to her feelings. ' Did you get any impression of what you had to do? What did you feel? ' She replied: ' I had a distinct feeling that I had to go and kiss M. A. W. on the forehead; but when I came up to someone and bent down to do it, I was sensible of a strong feeling that I was not to do it - and could not do it; and after that I could get no impression whatever'.

"Mary A. Wilson.

"Alice M. W. Ingram".

The percipient in both the following cases was our friend, the Hon. Alexander Yorke. In the summer of 1884 he mentioned to two nieces, as a joke, that some one had suggested to him the possibility of discerning the contents of letters pressed to the forehead; *and this quack suggestion led by accident to an apparently genuine experiment in thought-transference.

The account is from the Misses Adeane, of 19, Ennismore Gardens, S.W.

"June, 1884.

"Taking a letter from a heap on my mother's table, I glanced at the contents, and then placed it on my uncle's head, where he held it. A minute had hardly elapsed before he said, quite quietly, ' This letter is not addressed to your mother.' He then paused, as if waiting for another impression. ' It is written to Charlie' (my brother), and another pause, 'by an uncle - not a real uncle - a sort of uncle.' Another pause, 'It must be about business.' At this point I was so much astonished that I could not help telling him how true and correct all his impressions had been, which practically put an end to the experiment by giving a clue as to what the business was, etc. My younger sister was the only other person in the room at the time. The letter was addressed to my brother at Oxford by his trustee, and uncle by marriage, and related to business; he had forwarded it to my mother to read, and I selected it partly by chance, and partly because I thought, if there was only guessing in the case, it would have been a puzzler.

My uncle, Mr. Yorke, does not know the writer of the letter or his handwriting.

"Marie C. Adeane.

"Maude Adeane".

Again, the mother of these informants, Lady Elizabeth Biddulph, writes to us, on June 12, 1884: -

"My girls came down to the drawing-room with my brother, Mr. Alexander Yorke, about 3.30 on Sunday afternoon, May 18th. I was sitting with one of Mr. Biddulph's brothers, and his sister, Mrs. L. They had just brought me a letter sent by mistake to 31, Eaton Place. Presently Captain and Lady Edith Adeane came in, and then my two girls began telling us of what had happened upstairs. I immediately rushed at the letter I had just received, and laughing, held it to Mr. Yorke's forehead: he objected, saying, ' I shall probably fail, and then you will only laugh at the whole thing.' He thrust my hand away, and I left the matter alone and went on talking to my relations. Presently my brother rose to go, and hesitating rather, said, ' Well, my dear, the impression about that letter is so strong that I must tell you the Duchess of St. Albans wrote it.' It was so. She does not correspond with me; the letter, too, having been addressed by mistake to 31, Eaton Place, made it more unlikely there should be any clue, and its contents were purely of a business-like character.

Elizabeth P. Biddulph.

On another similar occasion, the present writer saw a letter taken up casually from a writing-table, and held to Mr. Yorke's forehead, in such a way that he could not possibly catch a glimpse of the writing. He correctly described the writer as an elderly man, formerly connected with himself, but could not name him. The writer had, in fact, been his tutor at one time. It need hardly be said that no importance is to be attributed to the holding of the letters to the forehead. In every case the writer and the contents of the letter were known to some person in the percipient's immediate vicinity, and that being so, any other hypothesis than that of thought-transference is gratuitous.

The following incident is an excellent casual illustration of the motor form of experiment to which the cases described on p. 63 belonged. It presents, indeed, a point which would lead some to place it in a separate category: the names unexpectedly produced were those of dead persons. But where the "communication " contains nothing beyond the content, or the possible manufacture, of the minds of the living persons present, it seems reasonable to refer it to those minds - at any rate until the power of the dead to communicate with the living be established by accumulated and irrefragable evidence.

One evening inAugust, 1885, some friends were assembled in a house at Rustington; and the younger members of the party suggested "table-turning " as an amusement. Three ladies - Mrs. W. B. Richmond, Mrs. Perceval Clark, and another - were seated apart from the larger group; and a small table on which they laid their hands, and which was light enough to be easily moved by unconscious pressure, soon became lively. The alphabet being repeated, the sentence "Harriet knew me years ago," was tilted out.. The name of me was asked for. "Kate Gardiner " was the answer. These names conveyed nothing to the three ladies at the table, but they caught the attention of a member of the other group, Mr. R. L. Morant. This gentleman was acting as holidaytutor to Mrs. Richmond's boys, and had not before that been acquainted with any of the party; nor had Mrs. Richmond herself the slightest knowledge of his family history. On hearing the names, he asked that "Harriet's" surname should be given. The name "Morant" was tilted out.

In reply to further questions, put of course in such a way as not to suggest the answers, and while Mr. Morant remained at the further end of the room, the tilts produced the information that Harriet and Kate met at Kingstown, and that Harriet was Mr. Morant's great-aunt, his father "Robin" Morant being her nephew.

We -have received in writing three independent and concordant accounts of this occurrence - from Mrs. Richmond, from the third lady at the table (who is hostile to the subject, but who was probably the unconscious percipient), and from Mr. Morant, who adds: -

"I felt distinctly and always rightly, when it would answer, and what it would answer. I found that it always answered the questions of which I knew the answer; and was silent when I did not: e.g., it would not say how many years ago [the meeting was], I was quite ignorant of where they met; that was the only answer beyond my knowledge. [It is not known if this answer was correct.] All the names given are correct: my father's name was Robert, but he was always called Robin. Kate Gardiner was a friend of my father; I believe she helped to arrange his marriage. Harriet Morant was his aunt. I am ignorant of much about this aunt; and from reading some old correspondence in June, I was particularly anxious to learn more about these names. No one at the table can possibly have known anything whatever about any one of the names given".

It is, of course, a matter of interest to know what indications of genuine telepathy may be afforded by these less systematic trials. For experiments with a comparatively small number of "subjects" (like those before described), however conclusive we may consider them as to the existence of a special faculty, afford no means of judging how common that faculty may be. If it exists, we have no reason to expect it to be extremely uncommon; on the contrary, we should rather expect to find an appreciable degree of it tolerably widely diffused. But (putting aside the results of §7, above), our only means, at present, for judging how far this is the case is by considering the evidence of persons who were, so to speak, amateur observers, and who in some cases were not even aware that the matter had any scientific importance. Such evidence must, of course, be received with due allowances, and, if it stood alone, might be wholly inadequate to establish the case for telepathic phenomena; but if these be otherwise established, it would be illogical to shut our eyes to alleged results which fall readily into the same class, provided the trials appear to have been conducted with intelligence and care.

It is unnecessary to say that this last proviso at once excludes the vast majority of the cases which one reads about in the newspapers, or hears discussed in private circles. We have already seen that the subject of "thought-reading" has obtained its vogue by dint of exhibitions which, however clever and interesting, have no sort of claim to the name. The prime requisite is that the conditions shall preclude the possibility of unconscious guidance; that contact between the agent and the percipient shall be avoided; or that the form of experiment shall not require movements, but the percipient shall give his notion of the transferred impression - card, number, taste, or whatever it may be - by word of mouth. That these conditions have been observed is itself an indication that experiments have been intelligently conducted; and the cases of this sort of which we have received records are at any rate numerous enough to dispel the disquieting sense that the possibility of accumulating evidence for our hypothesis depends on the transient endowment of a few most exceptional individuals.

I have spoken above of the urgent importance of spreading the responsibility for the evidence as widely as possible - in other words, of largely increasing the number of persons, reputed honest and intelligent, who must be either knaves or idiots if the alleged transference of thought took place through any hitherto recognised channels. And our hopes in this direction are, of course, the better founded, in so far as the necessary material for experimentation is not of extreme rarity. If what has been here said induces a wider and more systematic search for this material, and increased perseverance in following up all indications of its existence, a very distinct step will have been taken towards the general acceptance of the facts.