Over the Teacups | Page 8

that story passed directly from the
letter, which came charged from the cells of the cerebral battery of your
correspondent. The distance at which the action took place [the letter
was left on a shelf twenty-four feet from the place where I was sitting]
shows this charge to have been of notable intensity.
"Brain action through space without material symbolism, such as
speech, expression, etc., is analogous to electrical induction. Charge the
prime conductor of an electrical machine, and a gold-leaf electrometer,
far off from it, will at once be disturbed. Electricity, as we all know,
can be stored and transported as if it were a measurable fluid.
"Your incident is a typical example of cerebral induction from a source
containing stored cerebricity. I use this word, not to be found in my
dictionaries, as expressing the brain-cell power corresponding to
electricity. Think how long it was before we had attained any real
conception of the laws that govern the wonderful agent, which now
works in harness with the other trained and subdued forces! It is natural
that cerebricity should be the last of the unweighable agencies to be
understood. The human eye had seen heaven and earth and all that in
them is before it saw itself as our instruments enable us to see it. This
fact of yours, which seems so strange to you, belongs to a great series
of similar facts familiarly known now to many persons, and before long
to be recognized as generally as those relating to the electric telegraph
and the slaving `dynamo.'
"What! you cannot conceive of a charge of cerebricity fastening itself
on a letter-sheet and clinging to it for weeks, while it was shuffling
about in mail-bags, rolling over the ocean, and shaken up in railroad
cars? And yet the odor of a grain of musk will hang round a note or a
dress for a lifetime. Do you not remember what Professor Silliman says,
in that pleasant journal of his, about the little ebony cabinet which

Mary, Queen of Scots, brought with her from France,--how 'its drawers
still exhale the sweetest perfumes'? If they could hold their sweetness
for more than two hundred years, why should not a written page retain
for a week or a month the equally mysterious effluence poured over it
from the thinking marrow, and diffuse its vibrations to another
excitable nervous centre?"
I have said that although our imaginative friend is given to wild
speculations, he is not always necessarily wrong. We know too little
about the laws of brain-force to be dogmatic with reference to it. I am,
myself, therefore, fully in sympathy with the psychological
investigators. When it comes to the various pretended sciences by
which men and women make large profits, attempts at investigation are
very apt to be used as lucrative advertisements for the charlatans. But a
series of investigations of the significance of certain popular beliefs and
superstitions, a careful study of the relations of certain facts to each
other,--whether that of cause and effect, or merely of coincidence,--is a
task not unworthy of sober-minded and well-trained students of nature.
Such a series of investigations has been recently instituted, and was
reported at a late meeting held in the rooms of the Boston Natural
History Society. The results were, mostly negative, and in one sense a
disappointment. A single case, related by Professor Royce, attracted a
good deal of attention. It was reported in the next morning's
newspapers, and will be given at full length, doubtless, in the next
number of the Psychological Journal. The leading facts were, briefly,
these: A lady in Hamburg, Germany, wrote, on the 22d of June last,
that she had what she supposed to be nightmare on the night of the 17th,
five days before. "It seemed," she wrote, "to belong to you; to be a
horrid pain in your head, as if it were being forcibly jammed into an
iron casque, or some such pleasant instrument of torture." It proved that
on that same 17th of June her sister was undergoing a painful operation
at the hands of a dentist. "No single case," adds Professor Royce,
"proves, or even makes probable, the existence of telepathic toothaches;
but if there are any more cases of this sort, we want to hear of them,
and that all the more because no folk-lore and no supernatural horrors
have as yet mingled with the natural and well- known impressions that
people associate with the dentist's chair."
The case I have given is, I am confident, absolutely free from every

source of error. I do not remember that Mr. Rathbone had
communicated with me since he sent me a plentiful supply of mistletoe
a year ago last Christmas. The account I received from him was cut out
of "The Sporting Times"