1881.] Physiology of Mind- Reading. 41 1 
hands were upon her. I proved by some decisive experi- 
ments, in which a comparison was made with what could be 
done by chance alone, that this was not necessary, and that 
the silent, unexpressed will of the audience had no effect on 
the operator, save certain nervous sensations created by the 
emotion of expectancy. Similarly, I proved that, when con- 
nected with the subjects by a wire, she could find nothing, 
although she experienced various subjective sensations, 
which she attributed to “ magnetism,” but which were 
familiar results of mind acting on body. 
Another lady, who is quite successful in these experiments, 
thought it was necessary to hide keys, and supposed that 
“ magnetism” had something to do with it. I told her that 
that was not probable, and tried another object, and found 
that it made no difference what the object was. She sup- 
posed that it was necessary that the object should be secreted 
on some person. I found that this also was not necessary. 
She does not always succeed in finding the exact locality at 
once, but in some cases she goes directly to it ; she very 
rarely fails. 
In order to settle the question beyond dispute whether 
unconscious muscular action was the sole cause of this 
success in finding objects, I made the following crucial 
experiments with this lady : — Ten letters of the alphabet 
were placed on a piano, the letters being written on large 
pieces of paper. I directed her to see how many times she 
would get a letter which was in the mind of one of the obser- 
vers in the room correctly by chance purely, without any 
physical touch. She tried ten times, and got it right twice. 
I then had her try ten experiments with the hand of the 
person operated on against the forehead of the operator, the 
hand of the operator lightly touching against the fingers of 
this hand, and the person operated on concentrating her 
mind all the while on the object, and looking at it. In ten 
experiments, tried this day, with the same letters, she was 
successful six times. I then tried the same number of 
experiments with a wire, one end being attached to the head 
or hand of the subject, and the other end to the head or hand 
of the operator. The wire was about ten feet long, and was 
so arranged — being made fast at the middle to a chair — that 
no unconscious muscular motion could be communicated 
through it from the person on whom she was operating. 
She was successful but once out of ten times. Thus we see 
that by pure chance she was successful twice out of ten 
times ; by utilising unconscious muscular action in the 
method of Brown she was successful six times out of ten. 
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