Early in the present year (1897) I met a young lady who told me of three or four curious hallucinatory experiences of her own, which were sufficiently corroborated.  She was innocent of psychical studies, and personally was, and is, in perfect health; the pale cast of thought being remote from her.  I got a glass ball, and was present when she first looked into it.  She saw, I remember, the interior of a house, with a full-length portrait of a person unknown.  There were, I think, one or two other fancy pictures of the familiar kind.  But she presently (living as she was, among strangers) developed a power of ‘seeing’ persons and places unknown to her, but familiar to them.  These experiences do seem to me to be good examples of what is called ‘thought transference;’ indeed, I never before could get out of a level balance of doubt on that subject, a balance which now leans considerably to the affirmative side.  There may be abundance of better evidence, but, knowing the persons and circumstances, and being present once at what seemed to me a crucial example, I was more inclined to be convinced.  This attitude appears, to myself, illogical, but it is natural and usual.

We cannot tell what indications may be accidentally given in experiments in thought transference.  But, in these cases of crystal-gazing, the detail was too copious to be conveyed, by a looker-on, in a wink or a cough.  I do not mean to say that success was invariable.  I thought of Dr. W.G.  Grace, and the scryer saw an old man crawling along with a stick.  But I doubt if Dr. Grace is very deeply seated in that mystic entity, my subconscious self.  The ‘scries’ which came right were sometimes, but not always, those of which the ‘agent’ (or person scried for) was consciously thinking.  But the examples will illustrate the various kinds of occurrences.

Here one should first consider the arguments against accepting recognition of objects merely described by another person.  The crystal-gazer may know the inquirer so intimately as to have a very good guess at the subject of his meditation.  Again, a man is likely to be thinking of a woman, and a woman of a man, so the field of conjecture is limited.  In answer to the first objection I may say that the crystal-gazer was among strangers, all of whom, myself included, she now saw for the first time.  Nor could she have studied their histories beforehand, for she could not know (normally) when she left home, that she was about to be shown a glass ball, or whom she would meet.  The second objection is met by the circumstance that ladies were not usually picked out for men, nor men for women.  Indeed, these choices were the exceptions, and in each case were marked by minutely particular details.  A third objection is that credulity, or the love of strange novelties, or desire to oblige, biases the inquirers, and makes them anxious to recognise something familiar in the scryer’s descriptions.  In the same way we know how people recognise faces