Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 70.djvu/143

Rh for you must sleep or suffer while it is gone, it will be a source of joy to her. It may plead your cause for you in a way which protoplasmic bodies can never imitate. That this is not imagination or illusion we have abundant testimony, if the word of man unverified by instruments of precision is convincing to you. Thought and ideas, we are told, may be 'impressed on consciousness in solid chunks without waiting for words or clicks or other means of expression or for a lightning train to convey them,' and there are thousands of records to show how this is done.

"But you do not stop with the expression of your power over the ether and the astral messages it is the function of the ether to carry. You may exert control over matter itself. Mind is matter's king. Matter is the vassal of mind. Then under the force of mind, matter will change or vanish. Recent experimenters claim that by gazing at a photographic plate in the dark, an impression can be made on it. This is the mind flashing out through the human eye. Then whatever is in this 'mind's eye' should appear on the sensitive plate of the camera. But greater deeds than these were done long ago, as our honored president once pointed out, and to my mind they are told in records better authenticated. The sagas tell us that Odin wished to secure the golden mead of the giants that men might drink it and be strong as they. After great labors he came to the mead. He found that the giant Suttung had concealed it in a great stone house, to which Odin could get no key. So Odin and his friend the giant Bauge sat down before the house and gazed at its walls all day. By this means they made a small hole in the rock, and changing himself into an angle worm Odin entered the hole and at last carried the golden mead away in triumph. The influence of this golden mead is, no doubt, still potent in Odin's descendants whose glances have marvelous power.

"There was once a California nurseryman who had a good business and was making money, as the phrase is. So he put aside all the fruit trees which would sell and devoted himself to making others which would not. Each year he trimmed his plums and apricots and lilies and poppies, taking away the pollen which nature had provided and putting it on flowers to which it did not belong. Each year he planted thousands of seeds of many kinds, and when the plants came up, he pulled up nearly all of them and burned them in a great bonfire. Meanwhile he made no money, and lost little by little all that he began with. Then men began to see that all fruits and nuts and flowers changed under his hands. The plums grew very large and very juicy, red, blue and white and more on the tree than men had ever seen before. The lilies and the poppies and all the other flowers grew larger, the cactus lost its thorns and the onion its odor, the chestnut bore its fruit with its second crop of leaves and all things which he touched turned