“I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it as an unexplained marvel.  I think, however, I will turn over a furrow of subsoil in it.  The explanation is, of course, that in a great many thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest our attention.  Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the enormous number of impressions which pass through our consciousness, until in some future life we see the photographic record of our thoughts and the stereoscopic picture of our actions.

“Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads, and saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you had been waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is it possible that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of all I have been saying, and its bearing on what is now to come?  Listen, then.  The number of these living elements in our bodies illustrates the incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of our thoughts accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of; these coincidences in the world of thought illustrate those which we constantly observe in the world of outward events.”

Now for the anecdote—­one of Mark Twain’s.

Some years ago, Mark Twain published in Harper’s Magazine an article on “Mental Telegraphy.”  He illustrated his meaning by a story of how he once wrote a long letter on a complicated subject, which had popped into his head between asleep and awake, to a friend on the other side of America.  He did not send the letter, but, by return of post, received one from his friend.  “Now, I’ll tell you what he is going to say,” said Mark Twain, read his own unsent epistle aloud, and then, opening his friend’s despatch, proved that they were essentially identical.  This is what he calls “Mental Telegraphy”; others call it “Telepathy,” and the term is merely descriptive.

Now, on his own showing, in our second extract, Dr. Holmes should have explained coincidences like this as purely the work of chance, and I rather incline to think that he would have been right.  But Mark Twain, in his article on “Mental Telegraphy,” cites Dr. Holmes for a story of how he once, after dinner, as his letters came in, felt constrained to tell, a propos des bottes, the story of the last challenge to judicial combat in England (1817).  He then opened a newspaper directed to him from England, the Sporting Times, and therein his eyes lighted on an account of this very affair—­Abraham Thornton’s challenge to battle when he was accused of murder, in 1817.  According to Mark Twain, Dr. Holmes was disposed to accept “Mental Telegraphy” rather than mere chance as the cause of this coincidence.  Yet the anecdote of the challenge seems to have been a favourite of his.  It occurs in, “The Professor,” in the fifth section.  Perhaps he told it pretty frequently; probably that is why the printed version was sent to him; still, he was a little staggered by the coincidence.  There was enough of Cotton Mather in the man of science to give him pause.