ii8 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XI. No. 266 



hasmatoscope being applied to the nail, which is exposed to the 

 usual daylight (as strong as possible, but that from a house-window 

 is enough), the energy of the exchange going on between oxygen 

 and the tissues can be seen. This new idea is of great practical 

 importance in the study of the phenomena of nutrition, both in 

 physiological and in pathological states ; so that such physicians as 

 Professor Germain See are now taking the matter up and applying 

 it to the study of many pathological states, such as anaemia, etc. 

 Dr. Henocque is one of Professor Brown-Sequard's best men. He 

 has given the results of some three hundred and seventy cases in 

 which experiments were made. 



BOOK-REVIEWS. 



Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research. 

 Vol. i. No'! 3, 1887. 



The appearance of Miss Fletcher's paper upon ' The Supernatural 

 among the Omaha Tribe of Indians,' in the Proceedings of the 

 Psychic Research Society, is of importance, because it shows that 

 this society is in part ready to take the anthropological view of such 

 notions, to find their interest in the recording of such popular be- 

 liefs as a contribution to the statistics of human thought with no 

 more reference to their possible objective verification than is neces- 

 sary to shed light upon their origin. Apart from this. Miss Fletch- 

 er's paper is extremely interesting as showing the naturalness with 

 which the supernatural enters into the every-day life of unenligh- 

 tened people. It is also noteworthy that the Omaha ghost lets him- 

 self be heard so much more than seen, while with us the reverse is 

 the case. This fact is very suggestive, and several aids to an ex- 

 planation present themselves. It is also worth mentioning how 

 little the evolution of terror is associated with the ' ghost-noises ' of 

 the Omahas. 



All those who have followed the eventful career of the ' Phan- 

 tasms of the Living' — the depository of the work of the English 

 Psychic Research Society — will read with interest the controversy 

 between Mr. C. S. Peirce, the well-known mathematician and logi- 

 cian, and Mr. Edmund Gurney. The former makes a detailed 

 enumeration of all such cases regarded by Mr. Gurney and his as- 

 sociates as a proof of spontaneous telepathy, and shows that a 

 large proportion of these suffer from serious omissions and fallacies, 

 mainly sinning against the principles of the logic of induction. This 

 brings a lengthy reply from Mr. Gurney, and a still longer rejoinder 

 from Mr. Peirce. The discussion turns upon details, and must be 

 read in full. Two points may be briefly noticed. The first relates 

 to the estimation of the probability of a certain thought occurring to 

 our minds within a given period. This is always a delicate task ; 

 and, as so much of our mental activity goes on in the region of the 

 unconscious, it seems safer to make a very liberal estimate in this 

 regard ; and, if we do this, a larger number of coincidences of such 

 presentiments as the death of a friend (as prompted by an unde- 

 fined feeling about his welfare) with the actual occurrence will be 

 attributable to chance. It is through the neglect of this considera- 

 tion that the evidential value of many of the best cases is decidedly 

 weakened. Next, as Mr. Peirce well argues, if we admit that the 

 cases as they stand defy explanation by ordinary reasoning, it is 

 very easy to invent half a dozen hypotheses explaining the facts as 

 well as does the telepathic theory, and in the minds of many people 

 by no means as improbable as the latter. 



The reports of the several committees are more than usually sat- 

 isfactory. The report of the committee on thought-transferrence, 

 apart from an injudicious closing paragraph, is a frank confession 

 of negative results. The committee on experimental psychology, 

 of which Dr. C. S. Minot is the chairman, give the results of their 

 inquiries as to the prevalence of a feeling sufficiently strong to in- 

 fluence action with reference (i) to sitting down thirteen at table, 

 (2) to beginning a voyage on Friday, (3) to seeing the new moon 

 over your left shoulder. The results are, that both in men and in 

 women the most prevalent superstition is (3) ; the least prevalent 

 is (1) ; and that about one man in ten, and two women in ten, ac- 

 knowledge a belief in these superstitions. Furthermore, the ques- 

 tion, whether in choosing between two otherwise equally desirable 

 houses you would be influenced by the reputation of the one as 

 haunted, is answered in the affirmative by forty-four men and sixty- 



six women in one hundred ; but it should be added that a large 

 number place this choice on accessory grounds, and not on the 

 hauntedness of the house. Whether these statistics will be taken 

 as marking the prevalence of frankness or of real superstition, must 

 be left for each to decide. 



The reports on haunted houses and on mediumistic phenomena 

 presents few points of interest. The opposite is true of Mr. Cory's 

 admirable observations on hypnotic phenomena. Only a single 

 observation of the many ingenious tests devised by Mr. Cory can 

 here be given. The fact that some hypnotic subjects can associate 

 a suggested hallucination with a blank card, is explained by sup- 

 posing that som.e trifling irregularity on the card serves to their 

 hypersensitive senses as the direct excitant of the hallucination. 

 This Mr. Cory supports, and really proves. A pencil with one end 

 slightly nicked is placed on end on a mantel, and the subject is 

 given the suggestion that nothing is upon the mantel. Then eleven 

 other precisely similar pencils are placed on the mantel, when the 

 subject is asked to count them, and counts eleven. A strip of 

 board is so held as to cover the nick on the one pencil, and under 

 this condition the subject counts twelve, showing that the sight 

 of the nick sets the mind so as not to count that pencil. 



This valuable number of the Proceedings is concluded with two 

 notes from the pen of Prof. William James. In the first. Professor 

 James gives the results of experiments upon the ' re-action time ' in 

 the hypnotic state; showing that it is at times longer, and at times 

 shorter, than in the normal state, and that a more detailed analysis 

 of the kind of hypnosis is necessary to explain these results. The 

 other brings together a number of important facts concerning the 

 'consciousness of lost limbs.' 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 



ble. The ■ 



•»* Correspondejits are requested to be as brie/ as p^ 

 in all cases regttired as proof of ^ood faith. 



Tw:nty copies of the number containing liis com 

 free to any correspondent on request. 



The editor will be glad to publish any queri 



•cation will be furnished 

 tnt with the character of 



the 



al. 



Diamonds in Meteorites. 



On Sept. 4, 1886, a meteoric stone weighing about four pounds 

 fell at Novy Urej, Krasnoslobodsk, in the Government of Penza, 

 Siberia. In this MM. Latchinoff and Jorefeif found what they 

 supposed to be diamonds of microscopic size. In an insoluble 

 residue small corpuscles, showing traces of polarization, were 

 harder than corundum, and having the density and other charac- 

 teristics of the diamond, and were present to the amount of one 

 per cent of the whole mass (see Nature, Dec. i, 1887). Through 

 the courtesy of his Excellency Julien V. Siemaschko of St. Peters- 

 burg, I have been able to procure a small piece of the meteorite. 

 Mr. H. Hensoldt, section-cutter at the School of Mines, very kindly 

 prepared sections of the same, which I found to contain metallic 

 iron in small thin plates, magnetite in small opaque grains, a pla- 

 gioclase felspar, and olivine in oval grains, but was unable to detect 

 any of these bodies in the sections. Prof. H. Carvill Lewis, to 

 whom I sent the material, informed me that he had extracted 

 two small oval bodies, almost isotropic, and showing nt) more 

 traces of polarization than occur in many diamonds. With some 

 other fragments of the meteorite, and not with these, he made 

 two good scratches on a polished sapphire. He did not mount the 

 crystals, because they were again lost : so I could not examine them. 

 He was, however, inclined to support the views of the describers. 



I found, that, by grinding with a sapphire four particles of the 

 meteorite, I distinctly made a number of minute but deep scratches 

 on each polished face of four different sapphires with each piece of 

 meteorite. These scratches are characteristic of but one minemi 

 that we know, and that is the diamond ; but they are evidently so 

 minute, that they form a coating or an aggregate over the other 

 minerals, and were too small to distinguish, but yet exist in quan- 

 tity, and may also possibly be the amorphous form of the diamond 

 known as carbon or carbonado (?) Small pieces of the meteorite 

 were then boiled for some time in hydrochloric, sulphuric, and 

 nitro-muriatic acids. This readily removed all of the iron and mag- 

 netite, leaving only the skeletons of olivine, on which were small 

 black particles, one of which was elongated but rounded, suggest- 

 ing two joined cubes(?) On crushing one of these olivine pieces 



