Correspondence. 
[September, 
560 
not absolutely stated — indorsement of Mr. Bishop as a mind- 
reader, or at least leaving the question an open one. It is cer- 
tain that the majority, if not all, of those who received a copy 
of the letter were led to believe that the claim of mind-reading 
was to be established, and there was great disappointment on 
finding Dr. Carpenter’s letter had given an erroneous impression ; 
and from this disappointment there resulted an indifference to 
the solid and important basis of facft that existed in those 
experiments. 
The true course for Dr. Carpenter was very simple. He 
should have stated in clear language that Mr. Bishop was not a 
mind-reader, as he claimed, but a body- or muscle-reader, but 
that his muscle- or body-reading, though not new to Science, 
since it had been exhaustibly studied years before by Dr. Beard, 
with whom he had communicated on the subjedt, was yet of the 
highest interest to students of this side of psychology. 
For myself personally there is no cause for complaint, since 
the priority in absolutely demonstrating the philosophy of muscle- 
and body-reading has been conceded to me without dispute in 
America and in Europe ; but I fear lest scientific men whose 
taste would lead them to studies of this kind have been so far 
repelled by this one false claim that they may be tempted to 
negledt not only this special phenomenon of muscle-reading, but 
all the other phenomena of trance and the involuntary life with 
which are interwoven the profoundest problems of the century. 
To my own mind the subjedl is more interesting after it is ex- 
plained than before. In the accounts of the early English 
experiments that crossed the Atlantic the name of Prof. Huxley 
was used as a quasi-endorser of Mr. Bishop ; but a letter from 
Prof. Huxley, that reached me before I left New York, made it 
quite clear that his name had been used without authority.— 
I am, &c., 
Geo. M. Beard. 
London, August 17, 1881. 
PS. — The term “ muscle-reading,” coined by me on the first 
publication of my experiments, may perhaps be replaced by body- 
reading, sincethe phenomena are produced not by any one muscle 
or by any limited groups of muscles, but by the body or a part 
of the body acfting as a whole. A certain fineness and mobility 
of organisation is essential to the highest success in these expe- 
riments ; but in a degree we are all muscle-readers, and the 
number of good performers in America is very large. Brown the 
mind-reader was especially remarkable for the rapidity and pre- 
cision of his performances, although, like all of his class, he met 
with very many failures, and with some persons failed utterly. 
