"Brain action through space without material symbolism, such as speech,
expression, etc., is analogous to electrical induction. Charge the prime
conductor of an electrical machine, and a gold-leaf electrometer, far off
from it, will at once be disturbed. Electricity, as we all know, can be
stored and transported as if it were a measurable fluid.

"Your incident is a typical example of cerebral induction from a source
containing stored cerebricity. I use this word, not to be found in my
dictionaries, as expressing the brain-cell power corresponding to
electricity. Think how long it was before we had attained 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