“I very much doubted the success of the experiment, but I followed the directions of my friend, and I was extremely astonished to hear the steps of the man whom I wished to appear, running after me; he came up to me directly and asked me what I wanted with him. I will add that my friend and I had been walking in the garden and had seen and spoken with the carpenter, but when I wished him to come to me I was quite out of his sight behind the garden wall, one hundred yards distant, and had neither by conversation nor otherwise led him to believe that I intended to mesmerize him.
“On another occasion, when the Hon. Auberon Herbert was present, the following scene occurred. Gannaway was mesmerized and stood in one corner of the dining-room. Herbert sat at the table and wrote the following programme, each scene of which Mr. Glissold, the magnetizer, was to silently call up in his own mind.
“(1) I see a house in flames.
“(2) I see a woman looking out of a window.
“(3) She has a child in her arms.
“(4) She throws it out of the window.
“(5) Is it hurt—?
“Gannaway became much excited, describing each scene as it passed through the mind of his hypnotizer. Several well known persons add their testimony to the above statement.”
A single case of mental action so strange and unusual, no matter how well authenticated, might not impress a cautious truth-seeker, but when fortified by well studied cases in the experience of such men as Esdaile, as shown in his remarkable experiments upon the natives of India, and especially his well known one of hypnotizing the blind man at a distance, also those of Prof. Janet, Prof. Richet, Dr. Gibert, and Dr. Héricourt, in France under the observation of Mr. Myers and other members of the Society for Psychical Research, and hundreds of other cases of hypnotizing at a distance, or silently influencing the subject without hypnotization, the matter then challenges attention and belief;—and it is from abundant observation of such cases, from the simplest examples of thought-transference to the most wonderful exhibition of perceptive power at great distances, that the doctrine of Telepathy is founded.
In the following case the agent was able to project his own semblance or phantasm a distance of several miles; and it was then distinctly perceived by a young lady, a friend of the agent. The circumstances were these:—Two young men, Mr. A. H. W. Cleave and Mr. H. P. Sparks, aged respectively eighteen and nineteen years, were fellow-students of engineering at the Navy Yard, Portsmouth, England. While there, they engaged in some mesmeric experiments, and after a time Sparks was able to put Cleave thoroughly into the hypnotic condition. The following is Mr. Sparks’ account of what occurred.