Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/143

 MENTAL TELEGRAPHY

we have had to do in the case of the electric currents. Before the day of telegraphs neither one of these marvels would have seemed any easier to achieve than the other.

While I am writing this, doubtless somebody on the other side of the globe is writing it, too. The question is, am I inspiring him or is he inspiring me? I cannot answer that; but that these thoughts have been passing through somebody else s mind all the time I have been setting them down I have no sort of doubt.

I will close this paper with a remark which I found some time ago in Bos well s Johnson:

&quot; Voltaire s Candide is wonderfully similar in its &quot;plan and conduct to Johnson s Rasselas ; insomuch that I have heard Johnson say that if they had not been published so closely one after the other that there was not time for imitation, it would have been in vain to deny that the scheme of that which came latest was taken from the other.&quot;

The two men were widely separated from each other at the time, and the sea lay between them.

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In the Atlantic for June, 1882, Mr. John Fiske refers to the often-quoted Darwin-and- Wallace &quot;co incidence&quot;:

I alluded, just now, to the &quot;unforeseen circumstance &quot; which led Mr. Darwin in 1859 to break his long silence, and to write and publish the Origin of Species. This circumstance served, no less than the extraordinary success of his book, to show how ripe the minds of men had become for entertaining such views as

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