Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/621

Rh of unstable cells which is the triumph of the art of the chemist.

It is therefore not necessary for this experiment that one should gaze at an individual stamp. To think of a stamp will serve as well. Recognizing this fact, Mr. Cameron Lee, another English experimenter, attempted to secure the image of a thought. Placing his own eye in the focus of a lens in absolute darkness, he thought intensely of the face of a certain cat. After a long exposure, necessary on account of the comparative grossness of the photographic materials, a picture was formed. The negative shows a rounded outline evidently that of the enlarged pupil of the eye, and in its center was formed a faint image, which could be mistaken for nothing other than a cat. An account of this experiment was given in the daily press, but its true bearing was first seen at Alcalde.

At the meeting of the Astral Camera Club held in Alcalde on April 1st of this current year, its president, Mr. Asa Marvin, read a paper on these discoveries, calling attention to their astral significance. The supremacy of mind over matter, already indicated in a hundred ways, was thus splendidly illustrated. As a thousand miles of ether may be made to vibrate at the command of the will of the psychical adept, so may the grosser forms of matter be shaken or removed when this subtle and resistless force acts upon it.

The famous legend of Odin and the Golden Mead, as Mr. Marvin went on to show, is not a myth, but was probably an actual occurrence. It may be a reality again when Odin's descendants rival their ancestor in that wisdom for which the famous hero so freely gave his right eye. It is not unlikely that the actual Niffelheim, or mist-home, where he exchanged his right eye for wisdom, is to be sought in the Himalayas rather than in Scandinavia. Odin, it will be remembered, after he had gained this wisdom, wished a draught of the golden mead which the giant Suttung kept locked up in his strong house of stone near his castle of Spukheim. Odin had arranged with the giant Bauge, whose hay he had harvested, that he should help him to secure this life-giving drink. And thus, the saga tells us, when they had found the stone castle in which the mead was hidden, Odin and Bauge sat down all day before the stone wall and gazed steadily upon it. By this means, so the story goes, they bored a small hole through the stone large enough for Odin in the astral form of an angleworm to pass through, and by this means the mead was gained and the strength of the giants passed over to mortals.

The essence of this story lies in its illustration of the power of mind over matter when its forces are concentrated. By psychic intensity the cohesion of molecules of gross matter may be