66 GEOEGE JOHN EOMANES We- 



more or less fishy deductions out of the U.S. papers. 

 Further work may perhaps make the matter more 

 certain one way or another. Possibly the microscope 

 may show something, and so I have asked Schafer to 

 come down, who, as I know from experience, is what 

 spiritualists call ' a sensitive ' — I mean he can see 

 ghosts of things where other people can't. But still, 

 if he can make out anything in the jelly of Aurelia, I 

 shall confess it to be the best case of clairvoyance I 

 ever knew. 



I am very glad you have drawn my attention 

 prominently to the localising function in Drosera, as 

 it is very likely I have been too keen in my scent 

 after nerves ; and I believe it is chiefly by comparing 

 lines of work that in such novel phenomena truth is 

 to be got at. And this reminds me of an observation 

 which I think ought to be made on some of the 

 excitable plants. It is a fact not generally known, 

 even to professed physiologists, that if you pass a 

 constant current through an excised muscle two or 

 three times successively in the same direction, the 

 responses to make and break become much more 

 feeble than at first, so that unless you began with a 

 strong current for the first of the series, you have to 

 strengthen it for the third or fourth of the series in 

 order to procure a contraction. But on now reversing 

 the direction of the current, the muscle is tremen- 

 dously excitable for the first stimulation, less so for 

 the second, and so on. Now this rapidly exhausting 

 effect of passing the current successively in the same 

 direction, and the wonderful effect of reversing it, 

 point, I believe, to something very fundamental in 



