504 The American Naturalist. [May, 
Mr. Podmore has been an active member of the English “ Society 
for Psychical Research,” since its founding ; he was a personal friend 
of the late Mr. Edmund Gurney and is probably as much entitled to 
regard as an expert in the matters of which he speaks as any man 
living. Moreover, his cautious temper and shrewd common sense 
make him peculiarly well fitted to deal with questions in which the 
judgment of most persons is biased by either prejudice or superstition. 
The first five chapters of the book deal with the experimental evi- 
dence, which Mr. Podmore thinks strong enough to establish the ex- 
istence of some unknown method of communication. Then he turns 
to the spontaneous evidence, treating of such phenomena as coincident 
dreams, veridical hallucination, both individual and collective, cases 
of reciprocal telepathy, and of clairvoyance in the normal state and in 
trance. Much of the material adduced in these latter chapters cannot, 
I think, be fairly regarded as evidence for telepathy, or at least not for 
the type of inductive telepathy which the experimental evidence would 
lead us to infer. Much of it can be brought under any telepathic con- 
ception only by violent assumptions, and I cannot but feel that Mr. 
Podmore alleges it, not so much in proof of telepathy as in disproof of 
animism and spiritism, theories which these phenomena seem prima 
facie, to favor. 
In his last chapter, entitled “ Theories and Conclusions,” Mr. Pod- 
more indulges in some interesting speculations. ‘‘This close connec- 
tion,” he says, “ of the activity of thought-transference with the sub- 
liminal consciousness, the consciousness which appears in hypnosis, 
and occasionally in dream-life and in spontaneous trance and autom- 
atism, may perhaps offer a clue to the origin of the faculty. For 
the future place of telepathy in the history of the race concerns 
us even more nearly than the mode of its operation; and we 
are led, therefore, to ask whether the faculty as we know it is 
but the germ of a more splendid capacity, or the last vestige of a 
power grown stunted through disuse. By those who view the 
matter simply as atopic of natural history, the latter alternative 
will be preferred. The possible utility of telepathy as a supplement 
to gesture, etc., at a time when speech and writing were not yet 
evolved, is too obvious for comment. Whilst, on the other hand, 
such a faculty can with difficulty be conceived as originating by any 
physical process of evolution in our modern civilization. But more 
direct evidence of the place of telepathy in our development is not 
wanting. For there are indications that the consciousness which lies 
below the threshhold, with which the activity of telepathy is constantly 
