at first than Prof. Barrett had had, they
were ultimately convinced of the genuineness of the phenomena. In
addition, Mr. Edmund Gurney, Mr. Frederic Myers, Prof. A. Hopkinson and
Prof. Balfour Stewart, all responded to Prof. Barrett's invitation to
visit Buxton and test the matter for themselves, and all came to the
same conclusion as he had. Subsequently Gurney and Myers associated
their name with Barrett's in a paper on the subject, published in the
_Nineteenth Century_.

Prof. Barrett asked Wallace to read over the first report made by Prof.
and Mrs. Sidgwick, which at first seemed somewhat disheartening, and the
following is his reply:

REMARKS ON EXPERIMENTS IN THOUGHT READING BY MR. AND MRS. SIDGWICK AT
BUXTON

The failure of so many of these experiments seems to me to depend on
their having been conducted without any knowledge of the main
peculiarity of thought reading or clairvoyance--that it is a perception
of the object thought of or hidden, not by its name, or even by its sum
total of distinctive qualities, but by the simple qualities separately.
A clairvoyant will perceive a thing as round, then as yellow, and
finally as an orange. Now Mr. Galton's experiments have shown how
various are the powers of visualising objects possessed by different
persons, and how distinct their modes of doing so; and if these distinct
visualisations of the same thing are in any way presented to a
clairvoyant, there is little wonder that some confusion should result.
This would suggest that one person who possesses the faculty of clearly
visualising objects would meet with more success than a number of
persons some of whom visualise one portion or quality of the object,
some another, while to others the name alone is present to the mind. It
follows from these considerations that cards are bad for such
experiments. The qualities of number, colour, form and arrangement may
be severally most prominent in one mind or other, and the result is
confusion to the thought reader. This is shown in the experiments by the
number of pips or the suit alone being often right.

It must also be remembered that children have not the same thorough
knowledge of the names of the cards that we have, nor can they so
rapidly and certainly count their numbers. This introduces another
source of uncertainty which should be avoided in such experiments as
these.

The same thing is still more clearly shown by the way in which objects
are guessed by s