HUMAN FACULTY 271 



arranged in a peculiar form, of which he sent a 

 drawing. It began with the face of a clock, 

 numbered I. to XII., and then tailed off, much like 

 the tail of a kite, into an undulating curve, .having 

 20, 30, 40, etc., at each bend. This prompted 

 me to ask others whom I met whether he or she 

 saw anything of the kind, and I received affirmative 

 replies from a few girls. 



I then went to my Club and successively asked 

 the same question of every friend whom I saw, but 

 invariably met with a more or less contemptuous 

 negative. Nothing daunted, I inquired further, and 

 soon found a goodly number of distinguished persons 

 who perceived these curious forms, no two of them 

 alike. After prolonged questioning in many direc- 

 tions I gathered enough material for a memoir, and 

 being determined to publish it in a way that could 

 not be pooh-poohed, I selected six well-known friends 

 out of those who said that they saw them, and having 

 assured myself that they would speak to the veracity 

 of their several diagrams, I invited them all to a good 

 dinner, and took them to the meeting of the Anthro- 

 pological Institute on March 9, 1880, where the 

 diagrams were hung up. These were G. Bidder, 

 Col. Yule, Rev. G. Henslow, Prof. Schuster, J. 

 Roget, and Mr. Wood Smith. They acted faithfully 

 up to their assurances, and so the fact of the existence 

 of Number-Forms was solidly established. Their 

 remarks are published in the Journal of the Anthro- 

 pological Institute [63]. I possessed a collection of 

 most curious forms, not a few of them appearing in 

 three dimensions and drawn in perspective ; many 

 of them were coloured. 



