Let me mention also this curious theme, which succeeded.

No. 82. The child will be an ant dragging a crumb of bread.

And this other:

No. 98. Subject of the Dream. The child will be a Frenchman, a professor at the University of Tokio. A friend will send him as a present ten bottles of Bordeaux, asking him to analyze the wind to learn if it contains iron: iron will be found in it.

Finally, I requested Miss Marie to give verbally, two or three times, to the child, already asleep in another room, the suggestion to dream that she was playing with a red ball.

The same control as in No. 80. The child recounted her dream as usual to Mme. Annette, who reported it to me. In the dream she was an old gentleman who taught young people speaking another language. Another gentleman sent her a gift of several bottles of wine, she did not know the exact number, but thought it was eight or nine. She poured into this wine a little of the contents of a bottle and the wine became entirely black; she added, there was iron in it. Mme. Annette, not understanding the meaning of these words, said to her: "But if the wine contained iron, this iron would have broken the bottles!" To which the child replied: "No! no! the wine simply tasted of iron." The chemical reaction dreamed by the child conforms to the truth, for iron really produces a very dark coloration. It must be noted that neither the little girl nor Miss Marie Manzini have the least notion of chemistry. So we have the right to suppose the intervention of another intelligence. There was no dream of the red ball.

I know there is a ready theory for cases of this kind, that of the subconscious agent: it is not the will that acts, but the idea alone. We believe that also, except, if we admit that the idea may act mechanically, outside of the consciousness of the one emitting it, it becomes most absurd to suppose that ideas, in a state of repose in the subconsciousness of the agent, may manifest themselves in the form of a discursive thought, or in the manner of complex images, in coherent order. That is why the intervention from the other world, perceiving the idea, and reviving it opportunely, seems to us much better adapted to the nature of the phenomenon.

Let us pass to another phenomenon. Automatic writing gives exact information unknown to all the persons present, so that we must suppose there is somewhere a motive force acting at the moment. If it be a deceased spirit, it may act while dying as well as after its death. These spontaneous cases can almost never be verified;: however, there is a case of this kind which offers the advantage of having been noted by an eminent specialist.

Case reported by Dr. Liebault, 4, rue de Bellevue, Nancy.1

September 4, 1885. "I hasten to write to you concerning the act of thought-transference, of which I spoke when you honored me with your presence at my hypnotic seances in Nancy.2 This occurence took place in a French family of New Orleans, who had come to live for a time in Nancy in order to settle some money matters.

1 Phantasms of the Living. London, 1886, p. 293. 2 Let us remark in passing, there is no thought-transference in an automatic action.

"One day, the 7th of February, I believe, about eight o'clock in the morning, at the hour for breakfasting, Miss B------- felt a need, a something which urged her to write (it was what she called a trance), and she hurried at once to her large notebook, where she feverishly penciled indecipherable characters. She retraced the same characters upon the following pages, and finally, the excitement of her mind growing calmer, it could be read that a person named Marguerite was announcing her death. She imagined at once that a girl of this name, who was her friend and a teacher in the same boarding-school of Coblenz, where she had also taught, had just died.

All the G------- family, including Miss B------- came immediately to me and we decided to discover, on that very day, whether this death had really taken place.

"Miss B------- wrote to a young English friend, who was also an instructor at the school in question; she made up a motive, being careful not to reveal the real motive of her letter. By return post, we received a reply in English, the essential part of which was copied for me - a reply which I found in a portfolio scarcely two weeks ago and have mislaid again. It expressed the surprise of the English girl, concerning Miss B-------'s letter, which she had not expected so soon, since its motive did not seem sufficient for its appearance. But at the same time the English friend hastened to tell our medium that their common friend, Marguerite, had died on the 7th of February, about eight o'clock in the morning. In addition, a small square of printed paper was inserted in the letter - it was a death notice. It is unnecessary to tell you that I verified the envelope of the letter and that it seemed to me to have really come from Coblenz."

This is, therefore, a case where all fraud would have been impossible, and concerning which but two hypotheses remain: either the motive agent was the deceased person herself, or else an entity from the Beyond expressed the active thought, indispensable to transmission of the message.

We shall now invalidate the first of these hypotheses, by quoting another case in which the dying person could not, at the moment of his death, have influenced the subject.1

"On January 3rd, 1856, the steamboat 'ALICE,' which my brother Joseph then commanded, had a collision with another steamboat on the Mississippi, upstream from New Orleans. By reason of the shock, the flag mast or pole fell with great violence, and striking my brother upon the head, cracked his skull. Death was necessarily instantaneous. In the month of October, 1867, I went to the United States. During the visit I made in my father's home, at Camden, New Jersey, the tragic death of my brother naturally became the subject of our conversation. My mother then told me that she had seen my brother Joseph appear to her at the very moment of his death. The fact was confirmed by my father and my four sisters. The distance between Camden, New Jersey, and the scene of the accident is in a direct line of more than one thousand miles, but this distance is almost double by the postal route. My mother spoke of the apparition to my father and sisters on the morning of January 4th, and it was not until the 16th - that is, thirteen days later - that a letter arrived, confirming in its least details, this extraordinary 'visit.' It is important to note that my brother William and his wife, who now live in Philadelphia, then resided near the scene of the terrible accident. They also have assured me of the details concerning the impression produced upon my mother."

1 Phantasms of the Living, Vol. I, p. 204, taken from the French translation in Hallucinations Telepathiques, p. 117.