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
good deal of attention. It was reported in the next morning's
newspapers, and will be given at full length, doubtless, in the next
number of the Psychological Journal. The leading facts were, briefly,
these: A lady in Hamburg, Germany, wrote, on the 22d of June last, that
she had what she supposed to be nightmare on the night of the 17th, five
days before. "It seemed," she wrote, "to belong to you; to be a horrid
pain in your head, as if it were being forcibly jammed into an iron
casque, or some such pleasant instrument of torture." It proved that on
that same 17th of June her sister was undergoing a painful operation at
the hands of a dentist. "No single case," adds Professor Royce, "proves,
or even makes probable, the existence of telepathic toothaches; but if
there are any more cases of this sort, we want to hear of them, and that
all the more because no folk-lore and no supernatural horrors have as yet