ii6 CLAIRVOYANCE 



occasionally for a short time by a younger brother, 

 a medical student, who had gone abroad some three 

 years before. He had used the room as a night study, 

 and had no doubt got the bones from the dissecting 

 room of the hospital he was at when studying the 

 anatomy of the hand and arm, and had forgotten 

 to remove them before leaving England. 



It would not be possible to find a case more like 

 clairvoyance than this. Just now, however, the whole 

 question of that mysterious sense or faculty is, so to 

 speak, on its trial, and the evidence does not go in 

 its favour when we find that a majority of the sup- 

 posed examples of second sight may be explained by 

 telepathy. The case I have related was certainly 

 not one of telepathy; it is, I believe, simply one 

 of smell. 



It may be objected that, allowing there was a 

 smell, as there usually is from bones procured by stu- 

 dents from the dissecting rooms, and that it escaped 

 from the cupboard, there is still a big gap in the 

 process to be filled in. How came the man to know 

 that the smell, whether taken in consciously or un- 

 consciously, emanated from human bones and not 

 from something else with a smell? Most certainly 

 he did not arrive at the conclusion by any conscious 

 process of reasoning. It came to him^ I imagine, in 

 this way. The smell emanating from the cupboard 

 was too slight to be noticed, but for all that it was 

 taken in unconsciously and excited the subconscious 

 mind, and the mind working on it advanced step by 

 step to the conclusion: a smell pervading the room, 



