I
have left this earth and you yet remain upon it.

"I have been thinking a good deal on this subject and my reflections
have resulted in this conclusion."

His voice had now resumed its usual melody and power, and we sat down
while he turned the pages of Prof. Bain's little work entitled "Mind and
Body." He read (I marked at the time the passage): "The memory rises
and falls with the bodily condition; being vigorous in our fresh moments
and feeble when we are fatigued or exhausted. It is related by Sir Henry
Holland that on one occasion he descended, on the same day, two mines in
the Hartz Mountains, remaining some hours in each. In the second mine he
was so exhausted with inanition and fatigue, that his memory utterly
failed him; he could not recollect a single word of German. The power
came back after taking food and wine. Old age notoriously impairs the
memory in ninety-nine men out of a hundred."

My father then continued: "It seems to me quite clear that our memory,
at any rate, however little of our other mental attributes is engaged in
matter, is quite constructed in a series of molecular arrangements of
our nervous tissues. No doubt there is memory also in that subtle fluid
that survives death, but, inasmuch as memory is so closely expressed in
physical or material units or elements, does it not seem plain that as
spirits we shall probably lose memory?

"The material structure in which it existed, which in a sense was memory
itself, is dissipated by death. Memory disappears with it. But perhaps
not wholly. Some shadow of itself remains. What will most likely be
treasured then? The strongest, deepest memories only. Those which are
so subjectively strong as to leave even in the spirit _flesh_ an
impression. In this same little book of Bain's this sentence occurs:
'Retention, Acquisition, or Memory, then, being the power of continuing
in the mind, impressions that are no longer stimulated by the original
agent, and of recalling them at after-times by purely mental forces, I
shall remark first on the cerebral seat of those renewed impressions. It
must be considered as almost beyond a doubt that the _renewed feeling
occupies the very same parts, and in the same manner as the original
feeling_, and no other parts, nor in any other manner that can be
assigned.'

"It seems to me, my son, in view of all this, that, as the fondest hope
of my life is to send back to you from wherever I may be, a message, and
as we b