It is an old experience that, if one unimportant point in an event fits into a prophecy, people who have a mania for the miraculous straightway take everything else to be correct, and that, too, without making any investigation whatever. So it was in this case. At all events, the whole miracle was reduced to the following simple fact: the boy had had a dream in which he had dreamed of something he had heard the previous day. All the rest was due to imagination.

Transposition of the senses bears a certain amount of resemblance to clairvoyance. In it, stimuli, which normally would only affect a particular organ of sense, affect some other part of the body. For example, letters are said to be read by means of the skin instead of the eyes, without any heightening of the sense of touch such as is found in the blind. On the contrary, the part of the skin concerned is supposed to be stimulated by the light rays, even without direct contact. One of the most commonly mentioned phenomena is reading with the pit of the stomach, or hearing with the stomach. In Paris, I saw a woman who was supposed to read with the lateral cartilages of her nose, even at a distance of several feet But when those parts were covered with wadding the experiment failed. It is tolerably certain that she saw with her eyes; for though they appeared to be covered with wadding and bandaged, Braid has pointed out that such bandaging is of very little use.

I will here mention some experiments of Heidenhain's which are generally misunderstood, and which at any rate may be easily misunderstood. Heidenhain maintained that his hypnotized subjects repeated whatever he said to them when a stimulus was applied to their stomachs; it was necessary to speak close to the stomach to stimulate it. According to him the vagus nerve was set vibrating, and the phonetic sound-centre was stimulated, and thus a sound was made which corresponded to the one heard; but he thought the sound was heard by the ear and not by the stomach, the nerves of which merely stimulated the sound-centre and thus induced imitation of what was heard by the ear. It might be concluded from many accounts that Heidenhain thought his subjects heard with their stomachs, but nothing was further from his thoughts. I have already mentioned on page 86 that Heidenhain was wrong in many of his other conclusions. This was probably due to the fact that he ignored psychological factors, and was dominated by the desire to explain everything he could by means of some physiological diagram.

The law, of the individual capacity of the sense-organs would be violated by transposition of the senses. According to this law each organ of sense has its own specific stimulus, which has no effect on any other organ - e.g., the eye is stimulated by light, but not the sense of touch, or the stomach. Of course, the fact that transposition of the senses would be a violation of the above-mentioned law does not justify our denying that such transposition has ever occurred; here also we must demand proof-positive of its occurrence. Of all the innumerable cases that have been reported, I do not know a single one in which the various sources of error were satisfactorily excluded. Here again, the trifling signals which are given by spectators, and which act as a guide, constitute the chief source of error.

I now come to the action of drugs at a distance. At the present moment this is generally supposed to be disproved, though some authors still assert it. It would not be surprising if the number of its adherents were to increase. And certainly the belief in the divining-rod, which has recently gained fresh supporters, can only be considered an analogous phenomenon.

For, the divining-rod also implies action at a distance, in this case that of water or metals, on certain persons. Formerly, the divining-rod was often used for the purpose of finding springs or veins of metal, whereas in the present day the possibility of at least discovering springs by means of it is still believed in by a few trustworthy people. Heim and Franzius, in particular, have expressed their belief in the efficacy of the divining-rod, and many others - e.g., the district councillors v. Bulow-Bothkamp and v. Uslar - are active water-finders. Heim is very cautious in his statements, and considers the scientific geologist a better water-finder than the man with the divining-rod. Nevertheless, he believes that there are persons who can detect the presence of water hidden deep beneath the earth's surface, and he thinks that their success depends upon either a psychological or a physiological process. In his opinion, the divining-rod is merely a detail. It is the movements and slight contractions or twitchings of the diviner's muscles that are all important - the rod merely acts as a lever of contact, and its movements are due to the movements of the fingers and hand caused by the slight muscular contractions just mentioned.

The reason why the excursions of the distal end of the rod are greater, and therefore more readily perceived than those of the fingers, is to be found in its greater length. According to Heim, the process may be a psychological one, the diviner's knowledge of the terrain leading to the idea of the presence of water directly he comes to stand on ground under which it is lying. This idea would then cause involuntary muscular movement as in thought-reading, and the rod would sway in consequence. He certainly thinks that the process is purely physiological in other cases. He believes that there are persons upon whom the proximity of water acts as an excitant and produces a kind of tremor, the presence of which may be evinced by the rod swaying; but in this case, also, the rod is only of secondary importance.

Although at the present time some people express their appreciation of the divining-rod, others are strongly opposed to it. Wolff and Weber, for example, have pointed out the number of failures connected with its use. In any case, it is a fact that exact proof of its efficacy has not yet been brought forward. At least, no one' has hitherto shown that the number of successes obtained exceeds the probability of chance success. Even Heim's work in this connection is not convincing. He quotes almost entirely from memory, and admits that he did not make notes systematically, because at first he attached too little importance to the question. This is a pity, and compels us to receive his statements with reserve, because experience shows that positive results are much better retained by the memory than negative ones. Consequently, although Heim only estimates the number of successes at 10 per cent., we are compelled to ask whether this percentage is not much too high, and also whether the results might not equally as well be attributed to chance and falsification of memory as to the action of the divining-rod. In addition to this, we have also to consider the possibility of intentional fraud.