450 



♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



[May 29, 1885. 



Dickens was in league with the performer to deceive her 

 husband with the rest of the company present. 



The great diihculty in all such c-i.ses has been th.at the 

 person whose mind is influenced, the thought reader, has 

 been unconscious of the influence. Certain ideas present 

 themselves, but why or whence is unknown. The idea 

 must, one would say, have been received consciously ; it 

 is at any rate recognised consciously after reception ; but 

 there is no conscious recognition of its communication. 

 Now if two minds or consciousnesses, in the same person, 

 are at work in such cases, the difficulty is to some degree 

 removed. Suppose one consciousness (being iu that state 

 recognised iu .somnambulism when other influences than 

 those ordinarily at work afl'ect the mind) receives an im- 

 pression from the thoughts of others, and that the idea is 

 transmitted to the other consciousness, alone consciously 

 active, in tlio same way that impressions received during 

 the somnambulistic state afl'ect the wakened consciousness, 

 then the observed phenomena can be in a sense understood. 

 Only " in a sense," for no one has yet explained the 

 mysterious sensitiveness of the somnambulist, or how it 

 is that while memory retains no active consciousness of 

 events which had happened in the somnambulistic state, 

 those events exert a vague influence and excite unexplained 

 emotions after that state has passed away. 



We may certainly see reason for seeking in this direction 

 the explanation of some of those phenomena attributed to 

 so-called s])iritualisni. Many have been perplexed because 

 persons whom they shrewdly suspect to be rogues and 

 charlatans — nay, may eveu know to be so — seem to convey 

 to them, in writing or otherwise, such messages from the 

 dead as could not have been forged without some knowledge 

 as they themselves alone possess. But, in reality, such 

 messages would seem to come in all cases either directly or 

 indirectly from themselves. The first and only time my 

 wife ever wrote with the planchette, for example, she found 

 the instrument on which her fingers and those of a friend 

 rested starting ofT to write about what she was thinking of 

 (her friend not coiiScioMS^yknowing what my wife's thoughts 

 were). She herself and her friend left the planchette 

 alone forthwith — they were both girls at the time — 

 imagining there must be something uncanny about 

 it ; and very naturally. But my wife's second 

 consciousnes.s, the mind and will belonging to the 

 ordinarily inactive half of the cerebrum, may quite 

 actively have directed the planchette's career, and quite 

 unconsciously to herself. There would be no greater 

 my.stery in this than in the complete unconsciousness of the 

 awakened somnambulist as to the actions, ideas, and 

 emotions by which, whilelin the somnambulistic state, he 

 had been strongly moved. Now, if a medium, charlatan 

 though he may presumbly be, has the power of reading 

 minds in the hypnotic state (whether his own mind be iu 

 that state or not), he can make such answers or communi- 

 cations respecting the dead, either by planchette writing 

 or otherwise, as would seem to the inquirer to contain 

 proof positive of knowledge communicated by the .spirits, 

 or in some other miraculous manner ; yet he would really 

 have presented only the thoughts of the inquirer's other 

 self. It certainly corresponds with this view, that nothiug 

 which has not iieen known either to the inquirer or the 

 medium has ever been communicated in this way. 



One of the oddest cases of deception in this matter of 

 supposed communications from the dead came under my 

 notice a few months ago in Washington. A slate on which 

 a neatly-written communication from his wife, many 

 years deceased, had been produced by alleged spirit 

 agency, was shown me by her husband. The writing w.as 

 his wife's, and the medium could not have known her 



writing ; it was, however, rather better writing than hers 

 had been, wherefore it was comforting to be informed (as 

 he was by the deceased lady herself) that the liandwriting 

 improves in the spirit world ! He received also a neatly 

 written communication from a chi-ld of his who had died 

 at the age of six months ! The medium had not known 

 thi,s, by the way, or perhaps the result might have been 

 diflerent. The communication from a dead baby was re- 

 markable for the length of the words and the singularly 

 business-like tone of the message. However, in the case of 

 the wife, the communication would have been remarkable, 

 were it not interpreted as the product in reality of the 

 man's own mind. Of course, it was written by the 

 medium ; but l)y a clever bit of legerdemain tlie slate with 

 the communication neatly written upon it was substituted 

 (as any fifth-rate conjuror could easily manage) for another 

 which had been carefully cleaned. The belief of the 

 medium's victim, that a tiny bit of slate-pencil shut up in 

 the folding-slate, and so left, while the slate was beside 

 him, had done all the writing in response to the medium's 

 spiritual influence, was touching in its innocence. — New- 

 castle Weekly Chronicle. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHING. 



By W. Mattieu Williams. 

 IX.— GASEOUS CLOTHING MATERIAL. 



IN my last I showed how Rumford's experiments lead to 

 the conclusion that the resistance of air to the passage 

 of heat through it is the primary fact upon which the 

 efficiency of our clothing in retaining our bodily heat 

 depends, and that the function of the fibres is to imprison 

 between them a statum of air which cannot freely circulate 

 and carry away the heat by convection. 



The same applies to the fur and feathers of nature-clad 

 animals. The land mammalia generally have more hair on 

 their backs than on their breasts and bellies. The opposite 

 is the case with man. " Man's bare back " has been fre- 

 quently cited as an enigma that puzzles the modern evolu- 

 tionist. This conundrum was very fairly answered long 

 ago by Rumford in his eighth essay on " The Propagation 

 of Heat in Various Substances." He there tells us that 

 " Bears, wolves, foxes, hares, and other like quadrupeds, 

 inhabitants of cold countries, which do not often take the 

 water, have their fur much thicker on their backs than 

 upon their bellies. Heated air occupying the interstices 

 of the hairs of the animal tending naturally to rise ^(pirards, 

 iu consequence of its increased elasticity, would escape 

 with much greater ease from the backs of the quadrupeds 

 than from their bellies had not Providence wisely guarded 

 against this evil by increasing the obstructions in those 

 parts which entangle it and confine it to the body of the 

 animal." I may add to this that the part of man which 

 corresponds in physical position to the backs of animals — 

 viz., the top of his head — is protected by the gi-eatest 

 abundance of hair, and that his eyes are protected from the 

 blinding efi'ect of the sweat drops which roll down the fore- 

 head, when he works heartily, by the eyebrows and eye- 

 lashes ; the whiskers have a similar function, their absence 

 in women being consistent with their general unfitness for 

 severe physical labour. 



There is a further action of hair and feathers in impeding 

 the circulation of the air entangled among them which is 

 less obvious, and which our modern physiologists appear to 

 have quite overlooked, though Rumford pointed it out 

 very distinctly. This is the adhesion of air to the surface 



