THE SYMPSYCHOGRAPR. 597 



THE SYMPSYCHOGRAPH: A STUDY IN IMPRESSIONIST 



PHYSICS. 



By DAVID STAEK JOEDAN. 



THE Astral Camera Club of Alcalde was organized in Novem- 

 ber, 1895, for purposes of scientific research through the 

 medium of photography. The function of the club was the co- 

 operative study of man's latent psychical powers, that these might 

 be made helpful in the conduct of life. No powers granted to 

 man should be neglected or allowed to waste in idleness. Just as 

 the great physical force of electricity remained for centuries hid- 

 den, and known only by casual and unimportant manifestations, 

 so the great odic forces within man still are scantily revealed. 

 The method of the club in Alcalde was to be that of the most 

 rigid scientific research. It was to take up, one after another, 

 the discoveries of our eager century as they were made known to 

 the world through the medium of the daily newspaper. To these 

 were to be added those suggestions which alert intuition and 

 psychic practicality would naturally suggest. No hypothesis in 

 science was to be rejected beforehand, and no prejudice was to 

 stand in the way of the reception of any new theory that might 

 contain a living truth. 



As soon as the news of the marvelous experiments of Prof. 

 Rontgen had reached Alcalde, the Camera Club began work on 

 the X rays, and on the larger problem of the significance of pho- 

 tography without visible light. They had no difficulty in repeat- 

 ing the usual experiments. They got an outline of the skeleton 

 of a canary, the shadow of an empty pocketbook, the bones of a 

 finger surrounded by a gold ring, and the location of an imbedded 

 shot. Thus those strange rays of light, or odic force, invisible to 

 our eyes, because none of our ancestors ever had a chance to gaze 

 upon them, disclosed the presence of objects which had else lain 

 forever in darkness. In addition to this, the green light of the 

 vacuum tubes provoked that uncanny feeling which always pre- 

 cedes and presages a great discovery in occult science. From this 

 feeling the club was safe in predicting that far greater discoveries 

 were to follow, and that the X rays would not end in mere repe- 

 titions of Rontgen's triumphs in " skiography." 



In this they were not disappointed. Prof. Inglis Rogers, of 

 London, found that not only could pictures be produced in darl^- 

 ness by means of invisible force, but that the invisible waves sent 

 out through the ether by the mind could also affect a sensitive 

 plate. Just as one sensitive mind at a distance receives an image 

 sent out from the psychic retina of another, so could the same 

 image be concentrated and fixed upon a photographic plate. Prof. 



