837. In each case there are certain impressive features in the impersonation; but in each case also careful analysis negatives the idea that we can be dealing with a personality really revived from a former epoch, or from a distant planet; - and leaves us inclined to explain everything by "cryptomnesia" (as Professor Flournoy calls submerged memory), and that subliminal inventiveness of which we already know so much.

The Martian control was naturally the most striking at first sight. Its reality was supported by a Martian language, written in a Martian alphabet, spoken with fluency, and sufficiently interpreted into French to show that such part of it, at any rate, as could be committed to writing was actually a grammatical and coherent form of speech.

And here I reach an appropriate point at which to remark that this book of Professor Flournoy's is not the first account which has been published of Mlle Helene. Professor Lemaitre, of Geneva, printed two papers about her in the Annales des Sciences Psychiques: first, a long article in the number for March-April, 1897 - then a reply to M. Lefebure in the number for May-June, 1897. In these papers he distinctly claims supernormal powers for Mlle Helene, implying a belief in her genuine possession by spirits, and even in her previous incarnations, and in the extra-terrene or ostensibly Martian language. I read these papers at the time, but put them aside as inconclusive, mainly because that very language, on which M. Lemaitre seemed most to rely, appeared to me so obviously factitious as to throw doubt on all the evidence presented by an observer who could believe that denizens of another planet talked to each other in a language corresponding in every particular with simple French idioms, and including such words as quisa for quel, quise for quelle, veteche for voir, veche for vu; - the fantastic locutions of the nursery.

M. Lemaitre remarks, as a proof of the consistency and reality of the extra-terrene tongue, "L'un des premiers mots que nous ayons eus, metiche, signifiant monsieur, se retrouve plus tard avec le sens de homme." That is to say, having transmogrified monsieur into metiche, Helene further transmutes les messieurs into cee metiche; - in naive imitation of ordinary French usage. And this tongue is supposed to have sprung up independently of all the influences which have shaped terrene grammar in general or the French idiom in particular! And even after Professor Flournoy's analysis of this absurdity I see newspapers speaking of this Martian language as an impressive phenomenon! They seem willing to believe that the evolution of another planet, if it has culminated in conscious life at all, can have culminated in a conscious life into which we could all of us enter affably, with a suitable Ollendorff's phrase-book under our arms; - "eni cee metiche one qude," - "ici les hommes (messieurs) sont bons," - "here the men are good;" - and the rest of it.

To the student of automatisms, of course, all this irresistibly suggests the automatist's own subliminal handiwork. It is a case of "glossolaly," or "speaking with tongues"; and we have no modern case - no case later than the half-mythical Miracles of the Cevennes - where such utterance has proved to be other than gibberish. I have had various automatic hieroglyphics shown to me, with the suggestion that they may be cursive Japanese, or perhaps an old dialect of Northern China; but I confess that I have grown tired of showing these fragments to the irresponsive expert, who suggests that they may also be vague reminiscences of the scrolls in an Oriental tea-tray.

It seems indeed to be a most difficult thing to get telepathically into any brain even fragments of a language which it has not learnt. A few simple Italian, and even Hawaiian, words occur in Mrs. Piper's utterances, coming apparently from departed spirits, (see 960 A and 961), but these, with some Kaffir and Chinese words given through Miss Browne (871 A), form, I think, almost the only instances which I know. And, speaking generally, whatever is elaborate, finished, pretentious, is likely to be of subliminal facture; while only things scrappy, perplexed, and tentative have floated to us veritably from afar.

Analysis of the so-called Martian language proves it to be no exception to this rule. It is, in fact, a childish, though elaborate, imitation of French; - whose true parallel lies in those languages of the nursery which little brothers and sisters sometimes invent - as a tongue not understanded of their elders. The outbursts of this Martian speech are noticeable as a parallel to the "deific verbiage," which used to throng through the lips of Mr. le Baron (Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xii. p. 277), and for a long time impressed itself upon him as having some reality in it somewhere.

The most interesting peculiarity, indeed, in the Martian tongue is its exclusively French formation; which would seem to argue its elaboration in a mind familiar with French alone. Now Mlle Smith - who, by the way, is no linguist1 - had some German lessons in her girlhood, and one is thus led to the curious supposition that the Martian tongue was invented by some element in her personality which preceded the German lessons.

1 Her father, however, was acquainted with some half-dozen European languages and had besides some knowledge of Latin and Greek. (SeeDes Indes, p. 15).

I may perhaps recall here, a trivial experience of my own illustrative of this ingenious hypothesis of Professor Flournoy's. I once dreamt that I saw an epitaph in Greek hexameters inscribed on a wall, of which on waking I remembered only one line -

I could not construe this line, which is, in fact, nonsense; - till I remembered in a sudden flash a certain sense of shame felt by me as a small boy at having thought that Kara meant under - as though were .

The line, then, had a meaning: "But he, indeed, beneath the earth, embraced the strong consuming flame;" - not a well-chosen sentiment for an epitaph, perhaps, but yet up to the ordinary level of one's dreaming self. There must, then, have been some fragment of me yet surviving from innocent boyhood, and blundering subliminally in the same old style.