Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/661

Rh a rocky coast, a rough sea, an expanse of sand in the foreground. As I watched, the picture was nearly effaced by that of a mouse, so large that I could see only a bit of cliff above his tail. Two days later I was reading a volume of poetry which I remembered having cut open, talking the while, certainly not consciously reading, on the day of my vision. As I turned over the leaves, a couple of lines struck me as somehow familiar, though the book, a volume by Aldrich, was quite new to me:

 Only the sea intoning, Only the wainscot mouse.

These, I imagine, suggested the images." Doubtless Miss X's eye had fallen on these lines; possibly they aroused some fleeting images in the upper consciousness which were then forgotten. But granting the existence of the subconscious, it is more easy to understand the case upon the supposition that the whole process took place outside the range of her normal consciousness.

A still more striking case of the same author's has been much quoted:

"On March 20th I happened to want the date of Ptolemy Philadelphus, which I could not recall, though feeling sure I knew it, and that I associated it with an event of some importance. When looking in the crystal some hours later, I found a picture of an old man with long, white hair and beard, dressed like a Lyceum Shylock, and busy writing in a large book with tarnished, massive clasps. I wondered much who he was and what he could possibly be doing, and thought it a good opportunity of carrying out a suggestion which had been made to me of examining objects in the crystal with a magnifying glass. The glass revealed to me that my old gentleman was writing in Greek, though the lines faded away as I looked, all but the characters he had last traced—the Latin numerals LXX. Then it flashed into my mind that he was one of the Jewish elders at work on the Septuagint, and that its date, 277 would serve equally well for Ptolemy Philadelphus. It may be worth while to add, though the fact was not in my conscious memory at the moment, that I had once learned a chronology on a mnemonic system which substituted letters for figures, and that the memoria technica for this date was, 'Now Jewish elders indite a Greek copy.'"

If this strange vision had ever been suggested to Miss X before by her mnemonic line, why did she not recognize it? And if it had not been suggested before, either it had been suggested in her subconsciousness or else it was suggested to her upper consciousness by a subconscious memory of the mnemonic line.