593 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Rogers in a matter-of-fact way looked for a few minutes at a 

 postage stamp, then retired to a dark room, and gazed through the 

 lens of the camera at the sensitive plate. The figure of the post- 

 age stamp was on his mind, and from his mind it passed out 

 through the sensitive ether to the plate made ready to receive it. 

 The result was a photograph of the stamp small and a little 

 blurred, but showing the undoubted features of the gracious Queen 

 and the words "one penny." Thus was the bridge between 

 psychic power and photographic sensitiveness made once for all. 

 This connection established, there is naturally no limit to the 

 application of the principle. 



It thus becomes plain that the invisible rays of Rontgen are 

 not light in the common sense, but akin rather to the brain ema- 

 nations, or odic forces, which pass from mind to mind without 

 the intervention of forms of gross matter as a medium, and to 

 which gross matter in all its forms is subject. 



Nor is this principle new in the philosophy of man. The wise 

 of all ages have held that mind is sovereign over matter. Besides 

 this general law, it has been known to our fathers that in the eye 

 of the dying man is impressed the last scene on which he looked 

 in life. With instruments of precision we may examine that 

 scene, and by skillful photography we should be able to secure 

 and fix it for all time. Whittier foreshadows the broad law on 

 which this rests when he asks : 



Do pictures of all the ages live 



On Nature's infinite negative, 



Whence half in sport, in malice half, 



She throws at times, with shudder or laugh, 



Phantom and shadow in photograph ? 



It may be that by means of such negatives History is able to 

 repeat herself. It is not unlikely that among the latent powers 

 which are conferred upon man by the possession of the astral 

 body, are those which will enable him to read the pictures on the 

 infinite negatives of Nature, and by that means to rescue the rec- 

 ords of the vanished past. 



Following the experiments of Prof. Rogers, other physicists 

 have tried to photograph the psychical images as they are im- 

 pressed on the retina by the force of imagination. It is evident 

 that such images are distinct from those arising from immediate 

 contact with reality ; but their real nature is the same in essence. 

 When Inglis Rogers was gazing at the stamp he saw only an 

 image on the retina, and in reality it was not on the material cells 

 of the retina itself that the image rested, but it was on the tabula 

 rasa of the mind. It was outward from the mind itself, not from 

 the retina, that this was projected through the sensitive and re- 

 sponsive ether to the sensitive plate of photography, an arrange- 



