1876.J The Newly-Discovered Force , 195 
accepted, and ought not to be accepted, until they have been 
confirmed again and again by competent experts. 
Previous A ttempts to find a New Force . 
During the past forty years strenuous efforts to discover a 
new force have been made by scientific men all over the 
world. Mr. Edison himself, so he informs me, has made a 
series of elaborate experiments in this direction. In several 
instances men have fancied that success had crowned their 
efforts ; hence have arisen the delusions of odic force, 
started by Reichenbach, with which this discovery of Mr. 
Edison has been absurdly confounded, and of mind-reading, or 
the power of conveying thought from one brain to another 
without the aid of the ordinary senses, as recently announced 
by some of the scientific professors of America. 
For three reasons all these claims have been rejected by 
the scientific world. First, those who made them were not 
authorities on physiology, to which department their alleged 
forces belonged. Secondly, the experiments supposed to 
prove the existence of these forces, if we may accept the 
accounts given by the authors, were complicated with nu- 
merous and fatal elements of error, chiefly coincidences, 
mind aCting on body, and trickery, any one of which would 
destroy the value of any scientific experiment. Thirdly, 
the alleged results have in no instance been satisfactorily 
confirmed by any expert in experimental physiology. 
The claims of this newly-discovered force relate both to 
physics and physiology, and it is by physicists and physiolo- 
gists, who are trained to habits of experimental research in 
their respective departments, that it should be studied. 
The question whether there is in the human body any 
form or manifestation of force differing radically from those 
already known, I had already thoroughly investigated, and 
had reached long ago the decided conclusion that there was 
no evidence or suggestion of evidence of the existence of 
such a force. 
Relation of Accidents to Discovery . 
Into this and previous discoveries of a similar character 
the element of chance has largely entered ; that is, fortunate 
accidents have occurred to experts capable of appreciating 
their meaning. 
It was by accident that Galvani observed the twitching of 
z 2 
