{20} The professor is not sure whether he spoke English or German.

{24} From Some Account of the Conversion of the late William Hone, supplied by some friend of W. H. to compiler.  Name not given.

{28} What is now called “mental telegraphy” or “telepathy” is quite an old idea.  Bacon calls it “sympathy” between two distant minds, sympathy so strong that one communicates with the other without using the recognised channels of the senses.  Izaak Walton explains in the same way Dr. Donne’s vision, in Paris, of his wife and dead child.  “If two lutes are strung to an exact harmony, and one is struck, the other sounds,” argues Walton.  Two minds may be as harmoniously attuned and communicate each with each.  Of course, in the case of the lutes there are actual vibrations, physical facts.  But we know nothing of vibrations in the brain which can traverse space to another brain.

Many experiments have been made in consciously transferring thoughts or emotions from one mind to another.  These are very liable to be vitiated by bad observation, collusion and other causes.  Meanwhile, intercommunication between mind and mind without the aid of the recognised senses—­a supposed process of “telepathy”—­is a current explanation of the dreams in which knowledge is obtained that exists in the mind of another person, and of the delusion by virtue of which one person sees another who is perhaps dying, or in some other crisis, at a distance.  The idea is popular.  A poor Highland woman wrote to her son in Glasgow:  “Don’t be thinking too much of us, or I shall be seeing you some evening in the byre”.  This is a simple expression of the hypothesis of “telepathy” or “mental telegraphy”.

{31} Perhaps among such papers as the Casket Letters, exhibited to the Commission at Westminster, and “tabled” before the Scotch Privy Council.

{35a} To Joseph himself she bequeathed the ruby tortoise given to her by his brother.  Probably the diamonds were not Rizzio’s gift.

{35b} Boismont was a distinguished physician and “Mad Doctor,” or “Alienist”.  He was also a Christian, and opposed a tendency, not uncommon in his time, as in ours, to regard all “hallucinations” as a proof of mental disease in the “hallucinated”.

{39a} S.P.R., v., 324.

{39b} Ibid., 324.

{42} Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. v., pp. 324, 325.

{43} Proceedings, S.P.R., vol. xi., p. 495.

{45a} Signed by Mr. Cooper and the Duchess of Hamilton.

{45b} See Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, p. 91.

{48} Proceedings, S.P.R., vol. xi., p. 522.

{50} The case was reported in the Herald (Dubuque) for 12th February, 1891.  It was confirmed by Mr. Hoffman, by Mr. George Brown and by Miss Conley, examined by the Rev. Mr. Crum, of Dubuque.—­Proceedings, S.P.R., viii., 200-205.  Pat Conley, too, corroborated, and had no theory of explanation.  That the girl knew beforehand of the dollars is conceivable, but she did not know of the change of clothes.