466 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



declare that they cannot tell how they find the locality, that their 

 success is to them a mystery ; these declarations are made by private, 

 amateur performers who have no motive to deceive me, and whose 

 whole conduct during the experiments confirms their statements. 

 Other operators speak of thrills or vibrations which they feel, auras 

 and all sorts of indefinable sensations. These manifold symptoms are 

 purely subjective, the result of mind acting on the body, the emotions 

 of wonder and expectancy developing various phenomena that are at- 

 tributed to "animal magnetism," "mesmerism" or "electricity" 

 in short, to everything but the real cause. I have seen amateurs who 

 declared that they experienced these sensations when trying without 

 success to " read mind" through the wires, or perhaps without any 

 connection with the subject whatever. Persons who are in the vicin- 

 ity of galvanic batteries, even though not in the circuit, very often 

 report similar experiences. 



The facts which sustain the theory that the so-called mind-reading 

 is really muscle-reading that is, unconscious muscular tension and 

 relaxation on the part of the subject may be thus summarized : 



1. Mind-readers are only able to find direction and locality, and, 

 in order to find even these, they must be in physical connection 

 with the subject, who must move his body or some portion of it as 

 the fingers, hand, or arm. If the subject sits perfectly still, and keeps 

 his fingers, hand, and arm, perfectly quiet, so far as it is possible for him 

 to do so by conscious effort, the mind-reader can never find even the 

 locality on which the subject's mind is concentrated; he can only find 

 the direction where the locality is. Mind-readers never tell what an 

 object is, nor can they describe its color or appearance ; locality, and 

 nothing more definite than locality, is all they find. The object hidden 

 may be a coin or a corn-cob, a pin or a pen-holder, an elephant's tusk 

 or a diamond-pin it is all the same. Again, where connection of the 

 operator with the subject is made by a wire, so arranged that mass- 

 motion cannot be communicated, and the subject concentrates his mind 

 ever so steadily, the operator does just what he would do by pure 

 chance, and no more. This I have proved repeatedly with good sub- 

 jects and expert performers. 



2. The subject can successfully deceive the operator in various 

 ways first of all, by using muscular tension in the wrong direction, 

 and muscular relaxation at the wrong locality, while at the same time 

 the mind is concentrated in the right direction. To deceive a good 

 operator in this way is not always easy, but after some practice the 

 art can be acquired, and it is a perfectly fair test in all experiments of 

 this nature. 



Yet another way to deceive the mind-reader is, to think of some 

 object or locality at a great distance from the room in which the ex- 

 periments are made, and, if there be no ready means of exit, the per- 

 former will be entirely baffled. I am aware that some very surprising 



