Chapter 2

"The available class now consists of eight--four gentlemen and four ladies, from seventeen to forty years of age. Two of these (both ladies) I have never been able to take into the region of hallucinations. I can control them physically, can prevent their unclasping their hands, or laying down a fan, or rising from their chairs, or pronouncing their own names; but here my influence stops. I cannot make them think that the room is hot or cold, or that mosquitoes are prevalent, or disturb the testimony of their senses in any way.

"The other six are lost to the realities of life the instant I touch them. One of them I can put into a sound sleep in a second, and he will sleep until I awaken him.

"It should be stated here that these sensitives are above the average of intelligence and mental activity. Three of them are clerks in the departments, one, who took the valedictory in college, being an artist in the Smithsonian. Two are in business for themselves; one of them, a shrewd, sagacious and level-headed man as one would meet anywhere, with a sharp commercial turn of mind. This man differs from the others in being keenly incredulous--sceptical of his hallucinations when they seem unreasonable.

"For instance, at a reception the other evening, at which the members of the Cabinet were present with their families, I introduced to my sensitives a learned pig.

"'See here!' I said, when they were all in the mesmeric trance; 'here you are in my dime museum. Let me show you my educated pig.'

"They all wanted to see it, and I whistled, snapped my fingers, and called their attention to the fine animal before them. They evidently saw it.

"'A lovely little white pig!' said a young lady.

"'Only it isn't little and it isn't white,' said the silversmith; 'it is a big black fellow,' and he appealed to the others.

"I explained that it was a scarlet pig, and told them it could read and sing.

"'Sing! Oh yes, we hear you!' said the incredulous man sarcastically.

"I snapped my fingers. 'There he goes!' said the artist, 'singing 'Wait till the Clouds Roll By.''

"'I hear singing,' said Incredulous, turning to me. ''Titwillow,' isn't it? How do you work him--the machinery, I mean?'

"The others laughed at him. 'Why, the pig sings,' said the young lady; 'can't you hear him sing? can't you see him sing?'

"'He looks as if he sang. I see his jaws move, and he sounds as if he sang,' persisted Incredulous; 'but he doesn't sing. Pigs don't sing.'

"'Very well, what is it, then?' asked one of the clerks, triumphantly.

"'A tube and a hole in the floor, may be; it's well done, though,' said the doubter.

"'Suppose you go and find the tube,' suggested the artist.

"He went and kicked around where he supposed it to be, tore up a piece of the carpet and looked nonplussed.

"'Yonder's the pig over by the entrance, singing 'A Warrior Bold,'' said the artist, amid laughter.

"The scoffer came back to his seat and said,

"'It's probably ventriloquism.'

"'Aw!' said the silversmith derisively, 'you can't throw the voice any such distance nor make it sound clear and sweet like that. I've made a study of ventriloquism.'

"'Well, I've made a study of pig,' said Incredulous obstinately.

"Then I changed the illusion by making the pig's ear grow out three feet long, and then turning him into an elephant with one leg and four tails.

"Sometimes I turn my class into infants and have them 'play school,' with infinite fun; sometimes I transport them over the seas to Africa or Japan on my enchanted carpet, where for a brief space they enjoy all the delights of travel; sometimes we participate in battles, sometimes visit famous picture galleries, sometimes the artist enjoys a quiet talk with Socrates, or Moses or Confucius, providing both questions and answers in a curious dual action of the mind highly entertaining to the audience.

"The other evening I transformed my artist into President Cleveland. He assumed the character with quiet dignity, but said he had had a hard day's work and was tired.

"'Queen Victoria will visit you this evening, you know,' I said.

"'No!' he exclaimed with surprise. 'I didn't know she was in this country. When did she come?'

"'Yesterday, on the Aurania; here she comes, now.'

"He straightened up as I spoke and received her imaginary Majesty with real dignity and tact. After bowing and shaking hands he said:

"'I have heard with unfeigned pleasure of your Majesty's approach to the capital of the republic, and it is my agreeable privilege to extend to you the freedom of this city and country in behalf of sixty millions of people. Dan, get the lady a chair!'

"As she seemed to seat herself he listened a moment, smiled and said: 'I reciprocate those feelings, as do all Americans, and I trust that the amicable relations so long preserved between this republic and the mighty realm of which you are the honored and beloved ruler may never be broken.'

"'Where can the lady hang her crown?' I asked him. 'It must have a peck of diamonds in it. Can't I take it?'

"He looked scornfully at me and I added: 'Can't the boys manage to get it away from her Majesty when she goes down stairs?'

"'You are a disgrace to this administration, Dan, and have got to be fired out!' the President exclaimed angrily to me, and then he humbly apologized to the Queen.

"He casually added that the fisheries dispute might lead to trouble, and she would be prudent to let our boys get bait along shore where it seemed handiest.

"I know of no other thing in which there is so much entertainment as mesmerism. For the benefit of those who desire to experiment I append certain conclusions from my own experiments here:

"1. About one person in ten can be mesmerized.

"2. The proportion of people who have the 'power' to mesmerize, if it be a power, I do not know.

"3. Mesmerism is a trance and seems to me almost identical with somnambulism.

"4. It is as harmless as sleep. My sensitives occasionally come to me in the daytime to be put to sleep for the purpose of obtaining rest.

"5. Hallucinations that take place under mesmerism are seldom remembered in a subsequent waking state, but are generally recalled with vividness in a subsequent mesmeric state.

"6. Mesmerized subjects do not see the objects or people in the room, or hear any noise whatever except the voice of the operator.

"7. My sensitives could have an arm or a leg amputated, I have no doubt, without suffering any pain.

"8. Some of my sensitives are able to tell what goes on behind them and where they cannot see it, by some occult sense of which I am ignorant. I am at present pursuing study along this line.

"Others here are now experimenting, and I think mesmerism is the coming fashionable 'fad.'

"W. A. CROFFUT."

ANIMAL MAGNETISM.--Methinks that if some of our eminent (?) scientists were to investigate this much abused subject (as all of them might) they would soon find themselves _hors de combat_ in relation to their premises that all manifestations of mind are nothing but products of matter. Huxley, for instance, that the "mind is a voltaic pile giving shocks of thought," and many other quotations equally as absurd by other materialistic philosophers (?) who claim prominence as such.

As long ago as 1843 I was induced to investigate and try this phenomenon mainly for a hygienic purpose and afterwards led on by curiosity. I had no teacher, consulted no works on the subject, but derived all I learned in relation thereto by my own individual experiments, and in parenthesis say that what I learned I hold as above all price in settling in my mind the vexed question, "to be or not to be."

In 1847 I was in Wisconsin, and for the satisfaction of others I was induced to a renewal of experiments in magnetism. I was located with several other families with a view of forming a co-operative colony, so that excepting myself the rest had their residences closely together, whilst mine was half a mile from the rest. The subject at one time was brought up for discussion, and an earnest desire on the part of many to see something of it resulted in my finding a subject to experiment with at once, and fortunately he proved to be an extraordinary one. The finding of property through him in a mesmeric condition was a thing of common occurrence, and in some instances he seemed to be conscious of the mental conditions under which the property was lost. I found that he could take cognizance of what was occurring out of his sight, by pre-arrangements to test him.

One evening I mesmerized him, and in imagination took him to England, and prepared as I was to accept the marvellous, I was considerably surprised at the probabilities of some statements from a letter received afterwards. Telling of this to my neighbors, they suggested the institution of a series of experiments to thoroughly test the matter. The course pursued was this: His brother would magnetize him, distant from me one-half a mile, and in the evening, according to arrangements, my family were to be engaged at anything suggested to our minds at the time, something for instance somewhat out of the ordinary routine of family occupation, to make it more apparent, and by comparing notes it was evident that through some mysterious law or power of mind he was with us taking cognizance of our actions. This was so thoroughly demonstrated that the parties concerned would have subscribed and sworn to the same before any officer qualified to administer an oath.--A. LANSDELL, _in Golden Gate_.

GOOD CLAIRVOYANCE.--Dr. E. S. Packard, of Corunna, Me., in the _Eastern Star_, states that Mr. David Prescott, of South Sangerville, over ninety years of age, "wandered away into the woods, and not returning, a crowd of over a hundred men hunted for him nearly two days; the mill pond near his house was drained. Search was made in every direction but to no success.

"A gentleman of that place decided to call in the aid of Mrs. Stevens; she told him somebody was lost, and not being able to visit the place she drew a map or chart of the locality, giving directions, by which, on his return he was immediately found alive, but died the next day. The day following I was at South Sangerville, and stopping at this gentleman's house, examined the map, which was perfect in every respect. The house and shed were correctly drawn, the mill and pond near the house were marked, the field and woods, two fences over which Mr. Prescott must climb, even to the swinging of the road by the house was definitely given.

"The spot where she said he was, was shown by a large black mark, and he was found exactly in that place. When we consider that Mrs. Stevens never saw this place in her normal condition, it is to me a wonderful test of spirit power."

HYPNOTISM IN INSANITY.--We learn from the German periodical, _Sphinx_, that hypnotism has been used in an insane asylum near Zurich since March, 1887, in 41 cases, a report of which has been made by Dr. Forel. In fourteen cases there was a failure, but in twenty-seven there was a degree of success without any unfavorable results afterwards. In four of the cases due to intemperance a cure was effected and the patients joined the temperance society. A morphine eater was cured in the same manner in six weeks and dismissed from the asylum.

THE ANCIENT IBERIANS.

THEIR STATION IN CANADA DESCRIBED BY THE REV. W. H. H. MURRAY.--A PSYCHOMETRIC REPORT ON AN ANCIENT RACE.

The Rev. W. H. H. Murray, the eloquent minister who was once so conspicuous in Boston, on a yacht excursion to Canada recently wrote from Tadousac to the _Boston Herald_ as follows:

"At that point of time touched by the earliest ray of historic knowledge, the eye of the student of human annals sees, occupying the Spanish peninsula, a race of men called Iberians. These old Iberians were not a tribe or clan, but a people, numerous and potential, with a fully developed and virile language, skilled in arms and the working of precious metals, and industriously commercial. This much can be clearly inferred from the extent of their territory and the remnant of them, with their characteristics and habits, which still remain. This old people, themselves a colony from some other country, once existent and highly civilized in the remote past, spread from the Mediterranean Sea to the slopes of the Pyrenees, and all over southern Gaul as far as the Rhone, and flowed westward with a movement so forceful that it included all the British Islands. All this happened 4000 to 5000 B. C. They are older than the Egyptians probably by 1000 years, and were strong enough to attempt the conquest of the known world.

"These Iberians colonized Sicily. They were the original settlers in Italy and pushed their way northward as far as Norway and Sweden, where can still be found among the present inhabitants their physical characteristics--dark skin and jet black hair. This ancient people were not barbarians, but highly civilized. They had the art of writing and a literature. Poetry was cultivated. Their laws were set in verse; and for these laws thus written they claimed an antiquity of 6000 years.

"This ancient race has passed away, as all great races do. The rise and decline of a people are as a day. They have a sunrise, a noon, a sunset, and there remains of them and their splendor nothing but a gloaming, a twilight of a thousand years, perhaps, and after that

OBLIVION'S STARLESS NIGHT.

"This old Iberian, world-conquering race came to its sunset hour a thousand years ago, and the gloaming after their sunset is deepening into that gloom which hides all. Only a remnant, a hint of the old-time radiance, remains up to this day.

"In Southern Europe, the remnant of this antique race, the fragment of a root with the old-time vigorous sap in it, may still be found. There, on the Spanish peninsula where its cradle was rocked, the grave of a once powerful race is being slowly sodded; for there still live that strange people called the Basques. It matters not today what they are--chiefly mountaineers, I think--but they are of the old Iberian stock, and the Iberians were colonists from some unknown land, pre-historic, undiscoverable by us. Colonists and colonizers also. From some unknown land, hidden from us in the gloom of ages, these Iberians came to Southern Europe in ships. To Sicily they went in ships; to Britain and Ireland; to Norway also, and where else, or how far or for what, is left to conjecture. But being strong in numbers, ambitious to conquer, skilled in navigation, we can well believe that they pushed their flag and commerce nigh to the ends of the world.

"Now these Basques, to-day mountaineers, they tell me, were once, nor long ago, great sailors. In instinct and habit, they were true to the old Iberian stock, to which they were as the last green leaf on a dying tree. They were of a world-conquering race, and they sailed the seas of the world, seeking profit fearlessly. Four hundred years ago Jacques Cartier, himself a Breton, with the old Basque or Iberian blood warm in him--for the Bretons were of the old Iberian stock, with the same temper and look of face--sailed into the gulf of the St. Lawrence, and found--what?

THE BASQUES BEFORE HIM.

Not one Basque ship, but many. Engaged in what? In hunting whales. Whalers they were, and whalers they had been in these parts for years and centuries.

"How know I this? Because--the records are scanty, and pity it is that they are not fuller--Cartier himself, and other of the old navigators to these waters, found not only the Basque whaling ships before them, but the nomenclature of all the shores and of the fish in the waters purely Basque. Bucalaos is the Basque name for codfish, and the Basques called the whole coast Bucalaos land, or codfish land, because of the multitudes of codfish along the coast. And up to this day, underlying the thin veneer of saint this and saint that, which superstitious piety has given to every bay and cape and natural object in gulf and on river, you find the old Basque names of places and things--the solid oak beneath the tawdry coating applied by priestly brush for churchly purposes. There is Basque harbor, Basque island, and old Basque fort, and a place known as the spot where these old-time whalers boiled their blubber and cured their catch of fish. It was from these old Basque whalers, whose fathers and forefathers for a thousand or thousands of years had visited this coast in commerce, and who knew every cape, bay, island, shoal, and harbor from the Bay of Fundy to Cape Tourmente, as well as from the old Icelandic pilots, that Columbus learned of the existence of this Western Continent; and when he sailed from Lisbon on his 'world-seeking voyage,' I make no doubt that he as surely knew, by actual information, of America, as I know that the island of Anticosti is but 200 miles below me. And yet I read in a paper somewhere lately that some wise dunce had proposed to 'celebrate the fourth centennial of the discovery of America by Columbus'! That's rich!

"To-night the yacht Champlain is swinging at anchor in the harbor of Tadousac, and I am writing in her little cabin with a profound conviction that, a thousand years

BEFORE COLUMBUS WAS BORN,

a little group of men, Basques by name, then living in southern Europe, a remnant of the old Iberian race, anchored their ships in the same harbor in the month of August annually. Only half a mile to the west of me, the Saguenay, whose bottom is one hundred fathoms deeper down than the bed of the St. Lawrence, pours its gloomy current between the stupendous cliffs of rock which make for its resistless passage an awful portal. These monstrous cliffs of bare, gray rock have not changed in form or color or appearance since some force, next to that of the Almighty, lifted them from the under world and placed them to stand eternal sentinels at the entrance to this strange, impressive, awe-inspiring river--for the wind and wear of unnumbered centuries have left them cold and bare, soilless and treeless, save where some stunted shrub, with a single root, has spiked itself into a crevice, and there stands starved and dying, as it lives its withered life.

"As it is to-night to eye and ear, so was it centuries ago; and so the old Basque whalers saw it while yet the great continent to the west was a trackless wilderness from ocean to ocean and gulf to gulf. And Columbus and Jacques Cartier and Champlain were not, by five hundred years, yet born.

"The harbor of Tadousac is a basin shaped like a sickle. On the west the mountain wall of the Saguenay protects it. The eastern curve is sheltered by vast sand lanes, scoured from the sea bottom and whirled upward by some mighty eddy in geologic ages. To the north are mountains of stone, their gray surface flecked here and there by stunted fir and cedar or dwarfed birches. Between these mountains of rock and the water of the harbor or basin is a short, narrow plateau, lifted some fifty feet above the water line, every foot of which is historic to a degree. On no other bit of ground of equal size on the American continent has so much been done and suffered which can interest the curious, touch the sensibilities, or kindle the imagination and fan it into flame.

"There is reason to think that before the Christ was born the old Iberian ships were here; and their descendants, the Basques, continued the commerce which their progenitors had established and which rendezvoused here 1,500 years after the Galilean name had conquered kingdoms and empires. The Norsemen were here, we know, a thousand years ago, and many a night the old sea kings of the north drank out of their mighty drinking horns good health to distant ones and honors to Thor and Odin. Then, late enough to have his coming known to letters, and hence recorded, Jacques Cartier came, himself a Breton, and hence cousin in blood to the Basque whalers, whom he found here engaged in a pursuit which their race had followed before Rome was founded or Greece was born, before Jerusalem was builded, or even Egypt, perhaps, planted as a colony. St. Augustine, Plymouth rock, Quebec--these are mushroom growths, creations of yesterday, traditionless, without a legend and without a fame, beside this harbor of Tadousac, whose history, along a thin but strong cord of sequence, can be traced backward for a thousand years, and whose connection with Europe is older than the name!"

* * * * *

PSYCHOMETRY AND ARCHAEOLOGY.

Whether "the thin but strong cord" by which Mr. Murray pulls the old Iberians to these shores be mainly historical or imaginative, I have not attempted to decide; but as to the old races of Southern Europe there are relics already sufficient to evoke their history by psychometric exploration.

The _Popular Science News_ of Boston gives a sketch of some old relics from "La Nature" which I quote as follows:

"Recent explorations in Spain by two Belgian scientists, the Messrs. Siret, have resulted in some very interesting discoveries. Relics of a prehistoric race have been found in great abundance, ranging from the stone age to that of bronze and metals. These people buried their dead not only in stone graves or cells, but also in great jars of burnt clay, accompanied by pieces of pottery and other articles of use and value. This form of jar-burial is very widespread, and examples have been found from Japan to Peru. These relics are supposed to belong to that ancient race which lived in Europe previous to the Aryan immigration, the various branches of which are known as Iberians, Pelasgians, Ligurians, etc., according to the country in which they lived.

"Several skeletons were found adorned with silver and gold ornaments. One of the most remarkable is illustrated here. It is a female skull encircled by a band of silver, to which is attached a thin plate of the same metal. It is not known whether it was originally worn in the position as when found, or, as is most likely, had been accidentally displaced after burial. This skull was found in a cave near the station of Fuente-Alamo, where gold and silver are found in small quantities in the soil; and it is quite possible that in those ancient times the mining of the precious metals was a regular occupation of the inhabitants."

PSYCHOMETRIC DESCRIPTION.--Mrs. Buchanan, describing the subject from this engraving, without seeing it or knowing what it represented, spoke as follows:

"This is far away; it is remains of some kind; remains of a human being, of a very remote type of female. Her surroundings were very rude. She was of a race of strong animal instincts--a large people. She seems something like a squaw. (What of their habitations?) They were very rude, as much like caves as anything. I think they lived in caves and rocks. They hunted and fished. Their weapons were of stones, but they had some kind of metal which they could hammer out. They dried their food in the sun--fishes and meats. They had very little agriculture. They had a process for making things they wanted for domestic use, and for weapons, as well as stone implements. They may have used the precious metals, not as money but for ornaments. It was not a numerous race, did not propagate fast. They have all died out. There is no vestige of them on the earth. They were a brown, dark colored race. Their heads were low and faces large; jaws prominent."