NATURE 



\yuly 7, 1881 



We are told by newspaper correspondents that to this physical 

 gift Mr. Bishop has added the pow er of reading and getting 

 pictures of his subjects' thoughts, and now Dr. Cai-penter endows 

 him with the power of controlling the wills of his subjects, or — 

 " may " teste — with some unnamed power still more mysterious. 

 To Mr. Bishop as the successor of the Westminster whale or of 

 Master Pongo, no one can have the slightest olijection. Mr. 

 Bishop as a j;-rta/ scientific plienomenon will, I fear, require 

 better backing than the careftd testing of Dr. Carpenter, and 

 letters of introduction from scientific and medical men in Edin- 

 lourgh who received Mr. Bishop, and in their turn gave him 

 letters of intro Auction as a clever conjuror who performed by 

 mechanical means feats of strength and agility attributed by 

 spiritualists to their immaterial familiars. 



Thomson Whyte 



Merchiston Castle School, Edinburgh, July 2 



Mind-Reading versus Muscle-Reading 



Several years ago I had the opportunity of witnessing 

 in a private circle of friends some experiments on so-called 

 "thought-reading," even more striking than those recently 

 described in your olumns and elsewhere. An attentive observa- 

 tion of these experiments led u;e to question the accuracy of that 

 explanation of the phenomenon with which Dr. Carpenter has 

 made us so familiar, namely, unconscious muscular action on the 

 one side, and unconscious nuiscular discernment on the otlier. 

 After making the most extravagant allowances for the existence in 

 some persons of a mu cular sense of preternatural acnteness, 

 here still remained a large residuum of facts wholly unaccounted 

 for on any received hypothesis. These facts pointed in the 

 direction of the existence either of a hitherto unrecogni-ed 

 sensory organ, or of the direct action of mind on mind without 

 the intervention of any sense impressions. Such startling con- 

 clusions could not be accepted without prolonged and severe 

 examination, and it was solely in the hope of stimulating inquiry 

 among those wdio had more leisure and more fitness for the pur- 

 suit than uiyjelf that I published the brief record of my e.xperi- 

 ments which, some years ago, brought derision and denunciation 

 upon me. As no physiologist came forward to give the subject 

 the wide and patient inquiry it demanded, I went on with the 

 investigation, and for five years have let no opportunity slip 

 which would add to the information I possessed. A letter 

 addressed to the Times, asking for communications from those 

 who had witnessed good illustrations of the "willing game," 

 brought me in, at the time referred to, a flond of replies 

 from all parts of England, and down to the i)resent time fresh 

 cases are continually coming under my notice. Each case that 

 seemed worthy of inquiry was, if possible, visited and investi- 

 gated either by myself during the vacation, or by a friend on 

 wdiom I could rely. It is true that many long journeys have 

 been taken and much time has been spent without a commen- 

 surate reward, but this was to be expected. Still, after ca-ting out 

 cases which might or might not have been due to " muscle- 

 reading," there remained abundant evidence to confirm my 

 belief in the insufficiency of Dr. Carpenter's explanation. Until 

 this evidence is published, which it will shortly be, and the 

 accessible ca^es are examined and reported upon by a competent 

 and impartial committee, I simply ask the public to suspend 

 their judgment on this question. And to show that this is not' 

 an unrea' onalile request on my part, I here give a few particulars 

 of a remarkable case which reached me only a few months ago, 

 and was carefully investigated by myself last Easter. 



A clergyman in Derbyshire has five young children, four girls 

 and one boy, aged from nine to fourteen years, all of whom are 

 able to go through the ordinary performances of the "willing 

 game " rapidly and successfully, without the contact of the hniiJs 

 or of any comiintnication besides the air between the person 

 operatins; and the subject operated on. More than this, letters 

 and Words, or names of places, of persons, and of cards, can be 

 guessed with promptness and accuracy; the failures in any 

 examination not amounting to one in ten consecutive trials. The 

 failures, I am assured by the father — and there is no reason to 

 doubt his veracity — form a far smaller fraction when the children 

 are not embarrassed by the presence of strangers ; for example, 

 the parents assured me that their children, before I arrived, told 

 correctly seventeen cards chosen at random from a pack, without 

 a single failure, and after that correctly gave the names of a 

 dozen English towns indiscriminately selected. I will hov\ever 

 only ask attention to what came mider my own observation, 

 which in brief was as follows : — 



One of the children, Maud, a child of twelve, was taken to 

 an adjoining room, and both the doors between fastened. I 

 then wrote on paper the name of some object not in the room (to 

 prevent unconscious guidance Ijy the eyes of those who knew the 

 thing selected), and handed this paper round to those who were 

 present. Not a woid \^•as allowed to be spoken. I myself then 

 recalled the child, placed her with her back to the company, or 

 sometimes blindfolded her before bringing her into the room, 

 and put her in a position %\'here no whisper or other private 

 communication could reach her undetected. In from two to 

 twenty seconds she either named the object I had written down 

 (the paper, of course, being cmcealed) or fetched it, if she could 

 do S3 without difficulty. Each child v\as tried in succession, and 

 all were more or less successful, but some were singulndy and 

 almost invariably correct in their divination of what I had 

 written down ; what was more curiou-", the maid-servant was 

 equally sensitive. This led me to try other experiments with 

 those ttdio knew the words chosen : and the father was found to 

 be pre-eminently the best wilier, and to be in fact almost as 

 necessary for success as the sensitive " guesser" ; further experi- 

 ments showed that a battery of minds, all intently fixed on the 

 same word, w as far more successful than one or two alone. Appa- 

 lently a nei-ivus induction of the dominant idea in our minds 

 took place on the passive mind of the child, and the experiments 

 recalled the somewhat analogous phenomena of electric and 

 magnetic induction. There seemed to be a veritable exoneural 

 action of the mind. 



I am quite prepared for the chorus of sceptical laughter which 

 will greet this statement. That there should be disbelief is 

 quite natural ; a desire for further inquiry is all I ask for. To 

 those who, with a single eye for truth, even if it be in collision 

 with received opinions, are anxious to know if every possibility 

 of error or deception was removed, permit me to add the follow- 

 ing additional experiments. Instead of allowing the child to return 

 to the drawing-room, I told it to fttch the object as soon as 

 it "guessed " what it was, and then re*urn with it to the drawing- 

 room. Having fastened the doors I wrote down the following 

 articles one by one with the results stated : hair-brush, c jrrectly 

 brought ; orange, correctly brought ; -vine-glass, correctly brought ; 

 apple, correctly brough t ; toasting-fork, wrong on the first attempt, 

 right on the second ; knife, correctly brought : smoothing-iron, 

 correctly brought ; tumbler, correctly brought ; cup, correctly 

 brought ; saucer, failure. On being told this object the child 

 said, " Saucer came into my head, but I thought you would never 

 ask for that after asking for a cup, so I wasn't sure what it 

 was." Then names of to«ns were fixed on, the name to be 

 called out by the child outside the closed door of the drawing- 

 room, but guessed when fastened into the adjoining room. In this 

 way Liverpool, Stockport, Lancaster, York, Manchester, Maccles- 

 field were all correctly given ; Leicester was said to be Chester ; 

 Windsor, Birmingham, and Canterbury were failures. I might 

 give many other similar trials, for I spent three long evenings 

 testing the children ; but these results and the attempts made to 

 answer the many questions that at once started to the mind, such 

 as the effect of distance, &c., must be left for the present. 

 Meanwhile, at the suggestion of Mr. Romanes, I have arranged 

 for a small committee of scientific experts to visit the family, and 

 verify or disprove the conclusion to which I have arrived, which 

 is certainly opposed to that drawn by Mr. Romanes from his 

 experiments on Mr. Bishop (Nature, vol. xxiv. p. 172). 

 Whether Dr. Carpenter will find in this case "a precise 

 confirmation " of everything he has said on the subject I cannot 

 say. W. F. Barrett 



.Tnly 3 



A Case of Slow, Sub-Tropical Discharge of Earth- 

 Electricity, and the Sun Recognisant thereof 



In the course of yesterday afternoon, in the midst of a sky 

 otherwise clear and exquisitely blue, a large cloud of unusual 

 shape and character began to form in the upper regions of the 

 atmosphere vertically over, but very far above, the southern 

 slope and even most elevated mountain tops of Madeira, and 

 remaining there, as it did, most fixedly more than half the day, 

 so contrary to the locomotive habits of ordinary clouds, it soon 

 attracted the attention, and presently the fears, of most of the 

 inhabitants. 



As seen from this place, between ih. and 3h. p.m., there was 

 little more tlian a single dense cloud of peculiarly rounded out- 

 line and somewhat elliptical figure, stretching from the western 

 horizon to within 10° or 15° of the zenith; but as time advanced. 



