tained any real
conception of the laws that govern the wonderful agent, which now works
in harness with the other trained and subdued forces! It is natural that
cerebricity should be the last of the unweighable agencies to be
understood. The human eye had seen heaven and earth and all that in them
is before it saw itself as our instruments enable us to see it. This
fact of yours, which seems so strange to you, belongs to a great series
of similar facts familiarly known now to many persons, and before long to
be recognized as generally as those relating to the electric telegraph
and the slaving `dynamo.'

"What! you cannot conceive of a charge of cerebricity fastening itself on
a letter-sheet and clinging to it for weeks, while it was shuffling about
in mail-bags, rolling over the ocean, and shaken up in railroad cars?
And yet the odor of a grain of musk will hang round a note or a dress for
a lifetime. Do you not remember what Professor Silliman says, in that
pleasant journal of his, about the little ebony cabinet which Mary, Queen
of Scots, brought with her from France,--how 'its drawers still exhale
the sweetest perfumes'? If they could hold their sweetness for more than
two hundred years, why should not a written page retain for a week or a
month the equally mysterious effluence poured over it from the thinking
marrow, and diffuse its vibrations to another excitable nervous centre?"

I have said that although our imaginative friend is given to wild
speculations, he is not always necessarily wrong. We know too little
about the laws of brain-force to be dogmatic with reference to it. I am,
myself, therefore, fully in sympathy with the psychological
investigators. When it comes to the various pretended sciences by which
men and women make large profits, attempts at investigation are very apt
to be used as lucrative advertisements for the charlatans. But a series
of investigations of the significance of certain popular beliefs and
superstitions, a careful study of the relations of certain facts to each
other,--whether that of cause and effect, or merely of coincidence,--is a
task not unworthy of sober-minded and well-trained students of nature.
Such a series of investigations has been recently instituted, and was
reported at a late meeting held in the rooms of the Boston Natural
History Society. The results were, mostly negative, and in one sense a
disappointment. A single case, related by Professor Royce, attracted a
g