326 NATURE STUDIES. 



or of movements of expression. A large amount of 

 evidence, sifted with the utmost care, would be needed 

 to establish even a probability of such communication. 

 But would any man of .science have a right to say 

 that it is impossible ? " 



Supposing trickery eliminated by the various tests 

 employed by Professor Barrett and his colleagues, 

 the point to be determined would be, of course, the 

 method by which the person questioned was led to a 

 correct reply. It must be remembered that the 

 necessity of guarding against trickery interfered to 

 some degree with the prosecution of a systematic 

 inquiry into the laws underlying the observed 

 phenomena. It is unfortunate that in inquiries of 

 the sort this difficulty always arises. Thus the real 

 phenomena underlying so-called mesmerism are full of 

 interest, and might be readily made the subject of 

 scientific inquiry, were it not for the trickery practised 

 by many professed mesmerists, who, to impress 

 audiences, pretend to do what, in reality, is outside 

 their powers. In fact, the most satisfactory experi- 

 ments in mesmerism or hypnotism, or whatever we 

 choose to call the mental phenomena involved, are 

 actually those performed on animals, simply because 

 animals cannot be persuaded to be tricky " subjects." 

 That thought-reading should in like manner be tested 

 by experiments on animals may seem a wild and 

 fanciful idea ; yet the responses of the Mastiff 

 Kepler, described in the article on ' Intelligence in 

 Animals' (see p. 198), show that a dog may possess 



