Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/125

 MENTAL TELEGRAPHY

��A MANUSCRIPT WITH A HISTORY

NOTE TO THE EDITOR. By glancing over the inclosed bundle of rusty old manuscript, you will perceive that I once made a great discovery: the discovery that certain sorts of thing which, from the beginning of the world, had always been regarded as merely &quot; curious coincidences&quot; that is to say, accidents were no more accidental than is the sending and receiving of a tele gram an accident. I made this discovery sixteen or seventeen years ago, and gave it a name &quot; Mental Telegraphy.&quot; It is the same thing around the outer edges of which the Psychical Society of England began to group (and play with) four or five years ago, and which they named &quot;Telepathy.&quot; Within the last two or three years they have penetrated toward the heart of the matter, however, and have found out that mind can act upon mind in a quite detailed and elaborate way over vast stretches of land and water. And they have succeeded in doing, by their great credit and influence, what I could never have done they have convinced the world that mental telegraphy is not a jest, but a fact, and that it is a thing not rare, but exceed ingly common. They have done our age a service and a very great service, I think.

In this old manuscript you will find mention of an extraordi nary experience of mine in the mental telegraphic line, of date about the year 1874 or 1875 the one concerning the Great Bonanza book. It was this experience that called my attention to the matter under consideration. I began to keep a record, after that, of such experiences of mine as seemed explicable by the theory that minds telegraph thoughts to each other. In 1878 I went to Germany and began to write the book called A Tramp A broad. The bulk of this old batch of manuscript was written at that time and for that book. But I removed it when

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