52 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 



gotten, and only evoked by some chord of memory being touched. 

 The accidents of life, places, flowers and names, all act as mind links, 

 mementos of the past. A recent writer on " mental physiology," 

 styles memory the " organic registration of the eiTects of impressions." 

 The character in which organic changes are written may be said to be 

 indelible, and in a brain not disordered, the records of memory are 

 stereotyped. To recall them to consciousness may be beyond our 

 power ; we may think they are lost to us forever, till something 

 occurs to alter to an appreciable degree the minute nerve cells of the 

 brain, and thus to tear off the veil which hid from us the thoughts 

 and events of the past. 



Dreams are another connecting link, recalling at times long 

 forgotten scenes and faces, memories of bygone times which the 

 storehouse of memory unearths without any apparent reason. If it 

 were possible to trace a dream to its origin, some chance remark, 

 some word or act, not noticed at the time, has touched a chord of 

 memory which continues to vibrate in the nervous state after sleep 

 has sealed the body in repose, till all at once it flashes on the mind, 

 sometimes dimly, like objects in a fog, and forgotten directly, or else 

 so lifelike that it seems to be the cause of the sleeper awaking. 



There is another connecting mind link, undefinable, yet plainly 

 manifesting itself, which, for want of a proper term, may be styled 

 sympathetic attraction. I do not mean, by this, biology or mesmeric 

 influence, which themselves seem connecting links, but the mutual 

 reciprocation of mind existing between different individuals, whose 

 unity of thought and intellect run side by side, and whose ideas seem 

 to have been fashioned in the same mould. 



Psychology, in itself, would form a subject for a lecture, and I 

 have only introduced the above branches of it as a prelude to the 

 ethnological division of mind links, on which we will dwell at greater 

 length. Foremost amongst these stands Mythology. 



There is a striking similarity in the early records or legends of 

 all nations that plainly shows the connecting link that binds together 

 all the races of the human family. Oral tradition, doubtless, had 

 much to do with this. The classic legend of the Golden Age evi- 

 dently had the same origin as the history of Paradise. The Fall of 

 Man may be traced in the story of Pandora, the first woman, who is 

 represented as having, through curiosity, opened a forbidden box in 

 the house of her husband, Epimetheus. When she raised the lid, 



