PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND-READING. 465 



tried another object, and found that it made no difference what the 

 object was. She supposed that it was necessary that the object 

 should be secreted on some person. I found that this also was not 

 necessary. She does not always succeed in finding the exact local- 

 ity at once, but in some cases she goes directly to it: she very rarely 

 fails. 



In order to settle the question beyond dispute whether unconscious 

 muscular action was the sole cause of this success in finding objects, I 

 made the following crucial experiments with this lady : Ten letters of 

 the alphabet were placed on a piano, the letters being written on large 

 pieces of paper. I directed her to see how many times she would get 

 a letter which was in the mind of one of the observers in the room 

 correctly by chance purely, without any physical touch. She tried ten 

 times, and got it right twice. I then had her try ten experiments with 

 the hand of the person operated on against the forehead of the opera- 

 tor, the hand of the operator lightly touching against the fingers of this 

 hand, and the person operated on concentrating her mind all the while 

 on the object, and looking at it. In ten experiments, tried this day, 

 with the same letters, she was successful six times. I then tried the 

 same number of experiments with a wire, one end being attached to 

 the head or hand of the subject, and the other end to the head or hand 

 of the operator. The wire was about ten feet long, and was so ar- 

 ranged being made fast at the middle to a chair that no uncon- 

 scious muscular motion could be communicated through it from the 

 person on whom she was operating. She was successful but once out 

 of ten times. Thus we see that by pure chance she was successful 

 twice out of ten times; by utilizing unconscious muscular action in 

 the method of Brown she was successful six times out of ten. When 

 connected by a wire she was less successful than when she depended 

 on pure chance without any physical connection. In order still fur- 

 ther to confirm this, I suggested to this lady to find objects with two 

 persons touching her body in the manner we have above described. 

 I told these two to deceive her, concentrating their minds on the ob- 

 ject hidden, at the same time using conscious motion toward some 

 other part of the room. These experiments, several times repeated, 

 showed that it was possible to deceive her, just as we had found it 

 possible to deceive other muscle-readers. 



The question whether it is possible for one to be a good muscle- 

 reader and pretty uniformly successful, and yet not know just how the ^ 

 trick is done, must be answered in the affirmative. It is possible to 

 become quite an adept in this art without suspecting, even remotely, 

 the physiological explanation. The muscular tension necessary to 

 guide the operator is but slight, and the sensation it produces may be 

 very easily referred by credulous, uninformed operators to the passage 

 of "magnetism;" and I am sure that with a number of operators on 

 whom I have experimented this mistake is made. Some operators 

 vol. x. 30 



