Page:Weird Tales Volume 7 Number 3 (1926-03).djvu/88



is approaching and by the time these lines reach the public, I, Dr. William McPherson Jerbot, will be numbered among the dead. I am slowly dying of a loathsome disease contracted from a cadaver which passed through my hands in the course of my work. It will not be long now, only a few days at best.

I had intended making public what is to follow during my lifetime, but had not the courage. While I have been before the public virtually all my life, as practising physician and director of surgical research in one of our great foundations, yet I have always been curiously timid in the face of ridicule of any sort. And to have made public the results of this, my last experiment, would have required a courage I did not possess. I would have been branded as a lunatic.

Not believing that any good can come from a repetition of the experiment, I shall not go into details regarding the construction of the instruments used, but shall confine myself to a mere statement of what occurred.

Aside from my bare word, I have nothing to offer in support of what follows, but I think that should have some weight. My life has been a long one, given entirely to the search for knowledge, and I have never reached a conclusion without having weighty evidence in support of it. I think this statement has been demonstrated by the fact that none of the published results of my labors has ever been successfully disputed.

Most readers will remember the name of Professor Octavius Bohmer, who for forty years was associated with me in all my works and who died a decade ago. His loss to the scientific world was great, and to me personally, a staggering blow. We had become close indeed during all those years. Neither had a thought which was not shared by the other. Our work lay chiefly in the realm of the physical sciences. We studied the reactions of animate and inanimate life, so ably investigated by Professor Bose of Calcutta. Some of our results would astonish that great investigator should he be made acquainted with them. Our work in experimental surgery developed many facts hitherto undreamed of.

We considered mind to be physical, just as much so as sight, feeling, smell, etc. We were thoroughly material and had no patience with psychical research and the phenomena it attempted to explain, with just one exception: thought transference or mental telepathy. Our interest in this will be clear to you from what I have said above: that we considered mind as purely physical, therefore