WHAT PSYCHOMETRY CAN DO.
We can do little more than give a few general illustrations. Professor Denton, having thoroughly satisfied himself of the reality of psychometry, wondered if letters had photographed upon them the impressions of the life and the image of the writer. Why not fossils? “He gave his sister a specimen from the carboniferous formation; closing her eyes, she described those swamps and trees, with their tufted heads and scaly trunks, with the great frog-like animals that existed in that age. To his inexpressible delight the key to the ages was in his hands. He concluded that nature had been photographing from the very first. The black islands that floated upon the fiery sea, the gelatinous dots, the first life on our planet, up through everything that flew or swam, had been photographed by Nature, and ten thousand experiments had confirmed the theory. He got a specimen of the lava that flowed from Kilava, in Hawaii, in 1848. His sister by its means described the boiling ocean, the cataract of molten lava that almost equalled Niagara in size. A small fragment of a meteorite that fell in Painesville, O., was given to his wife’s mother, a sensitive who did not then believe in psychometry. This is what she said: ‘I seem to be travelling away, away, through nothing, right forward. I see what look like stars and mist. I seem to be taken right up; the other specimens took me down.’ His wife, independently, gave a similar description, but saw it revolving, and its tail of sparks. He took steps to prove that this was not mind reading by wrapping the specimens in paper, shaking them up in a hat, and allowing the sensitive to pick out one and describe it, without anyone knowing which it was. Among them were a fragment of brick from ancient Rome, antimony from Borneo, silver from Mexico, basalt from Fingal’s Cave. Each place was described correctly by the sensitive in the most minute detail. A fragment from the Mount of Olives brought a description of Jerusalem; and one from the Great Pyramid enabled a young man of Melbourne to name and describe it. There was a practical side to the question. His wife had, from a chip of wood, described a suicide; this was subsequently confirmed. A number of experiments from a fragment of Kent’s Cave, fragments from Pompeii and other places brought minute descriptions from the sensitive.”
Mr. Stead bears his testimony to psychometry. He gave a shilling to two ladies, at different periods, and unknown to each other. In fact, they were perfect strangers. This shilling, in his mind, had a special story connected with it. The first lady lived in Wimbledon, and had the profession of being a clairvoyante. To use Mr. Stead’s own words, he states:—“I took from my purse a shilling which I most prized of all the pieces of money in my possession. I said nothing to her beyond that I had carried it in my pocket for several years. She held the shilling in her hand for sometime, and said:—‘This carries me back to a time of confusion and much anxiety, with a feeling that everything depended upon a successful result. This shilling brings me a vision of a very low woman, ignorant and drunken, with whom you had much better have nothing to do. There is a great deal of fever about. I feel great pains, as if I had rheumatic fever in my ankles and joints, but especially in my ankles and my throat. I suffer horribly in my throat; it is an awful pain. And now I feel a coarse, bare hand pass over my brow as distinctly as if you had laid your hand there. It must be her hand. I feel the loss of a child. This woman is brought to me by another. She is about thirty-two years; about five feet high, with dark brown hair, grey eyes, small, nicely-formed nose, large mouth.’” “Can you tell me her name?” asked Mr. Stead. “Not certain, but I think it seems like Annie.” “That is all right,” said Mr. Stead, and he told her the story of that shilling. About a month afterwards, Mr. Stead tried a Swedish opera singer, who had clairvoyant powers, with the shilling. She pressed it to her brow, and then she told Mr. Stead “she saw a poor woman give him, from her pocket-money, the last shilling she possessed. She has a great admiration for you, she said. She seems to think you have saved her, but she is not une grande dame. Indeed, she seems to be a girl of the town.” Mr. Stead said:—“I had not spoken a word, or given her the least hint of the story of the shilling.” Now, what are the facts? Mr. Stead says that he “was standing his trial at the Old Bailey, a poor outcast girl of the streets, who was dying of a loathsome disease in the hospital, asked that the only shilling that she possessed in the world, might be given to the fund which was being raised in his defence. It was handed to him when he came out of jail, with, ‘From a dying girl in hospital, who gives her last shilling,’ written on the paper.” He (Mr. Stead) has carried it about him ever since, never allowing it to be out of his possession for a single day.
The symptoms which the first clairvoyante, or psychometrix, described, were very like those which this poor creature was suffering from in her dying hours. It is too probable that the donor was a low, drunken woman.
These two readings are actually more psychometric than clairvoyant, because, from the clue furnished, they went back and described the conditions and surroundings of the woman who parted with this shilling. They were not thought-readers, because they did not describe what was passing in Mr. Stead’s mind. Mr. Stead’s experiences fairly illustrate the exercise, in the earlier stages of employment, of the psychometric faculty.
While engaged writing the “Real Ghost Stories,” Mr. Stead says:—“My attention was called to a young lady, Miss Catherine Ross, of 41 High Street, Smethwick, Birmingham, who, being left with an invalid sister to provide for, and without other available profession or industry, bethought herself of a curious gift of reading character, with which she seems to have been born, and had subsequently succeeded in earning a more or less precarious income by writing out characters at the modest fee of 5s. You sent her any article you pleased that had been in contact with the object, and she sent you by return a written analysis of the subject’s character. I sent her various articles from one person at different times, not telling her they were from the same person. At one time a tuft of hair from his beard, at another time a fragment of a nail, and a third time a scrap of handwriting. Each delineation of character differed in some points from the other two, but all agreed, and they were all remarkably correct. When she sent the last she added, ‘I don’t know how it is, but I feel I have described this person before.’ I have tried her since then with locks of hair from persons of the most varied disposition, and have found her wonderfully correct.”
“All these things are very wonderful, but the cumulative value of the evidence is too great for any one to pooh-pooh it as antecedently impossible. The chances against it being a mere coincidence are many millions to one.”
I believe had this young lady, or others thus endowed, had the training, such as Buchanan, Denton, or other experienced teachers give their pupils, she would make a high class psychometer.
Rev. Minot J. Savage had a paper in a recent number of The Arena, on Psychical Research, etc., in which he said—“On a certain morning I visited a psychometrist. Several experiments were made. I will relate only one, as a good specimen of what has occurred in my presence more than once. The lady was not entranced or, so far as I could see, in any other than her normal condition. I handed her a letter which I had recently received. She took it, and held it in her right hand, pressing it close, so as to come into as vital contact with it as possible. I had taken it out of its envelope, so that she might touch it more effectively, but it was not unfolded even so much as to give her an opportunity to see even the name. It was written by a man whom she had never seen, and of whom she had never heard. After holding it a moment she said, ‘This man is either a minister or a lawyer; I cannot tell which. He is a man of a good deal more than usual intellectual power. And yet he has never met with any success in life as one would have expected, considering his natural ability. Something has happened to thwart him and interfere with his success. At the present time he is suffering with severe illness and mental depression. He has pain here’ (putting her hand to the back of her head, at the base of the brain).
“She said much more, describing the man as well as I could have done it myself. But I will quote no more, for I wish to let a few salient points stand in clear outline. These points I will number, for the sake of clearness:—
1. “She tells me he is a man, though she has not even glanced at the letter.”
2. “She says he is either a minister or a lawyer; she cannot tell which. No wonder, for he was both; that is, he had preached for some years, then he had left the pulpit, studied law, and at this time was not actively engaged in either profession.”
3. “She speaks of his great natural ability. This was true in a most marked degree.”
4. “But he had not succeeded as one would have expected. This again was strikingly true. Certain things had happened—which I do not feel at liberty to publish—which had broken off his career in the middle and made his short life seem abortive.”
About eighteen years ago a lady in Swansea sent me a lock of hair, and asked me to send her my impressions. I did so, which I remember were not pleasant. I informed her, as near as my recollection now serves, that the person to whom the hair belonged was seriously ill. No earthly skill could do anything for him. Diagnosing the character of the insidious disease which was then undermining a once powerful and active organisation, I felt constrained to add he would live six weeks. I held the envelope, with its contents, in my left hand, and wrote the impressions as they came with my right. I remember hesitating about sending that letter, but eventually sent it. The accuracy of my diagnosis, description of the patient, and the fulfilment of the prophecy as to his death were substantiated in a Swansea paper, The Bat. The patient was no other than Captain Hudson, the British master mariner who sailed the first ship on teetotal principles from a British port, and who subsequently became one of the most powerful of British mesmerists. The lady who sent the lock of hair was his wife, and the lady who contributed the letter to the papers was his widow. Of similar experiences Mrs. Coates and I have had many.