Telepathy—Or What?

Letter to the Editor, All “old hands,” who have lived among our brown friends of the Australian plains, or “summer-isles of Eden” of the Pacific, have seen many strange things, which they don’t talk about to pseudo civilised folk of noisy Sydney, or busy Brisbane.

The healing of serious, surgical wounds by what doctors call “first in tention,” in a few minutes, as I have seen done by Tohungas of Aotearoa fifty years ago; or the transference of thoughts or messages over vast distances by certain gifted members of tribes whom we call (or once called) “savages,” are matters simply not believed in! If you tell folk of such things, they look compassionately at you, or their lips turn upwards in a grin.

But these dark-skinned folk came southwards, or rather, their ancestors did, when the Mongols were shoving into China’s ribs and making the highly civilised, ancient Asian races move down south a few hundred years ago. They were pushed out of civilised parts, as we ourselves have been; and, like us, they brought the frayed ends of sciences and knowledge that still stick in places—like their religious symbolisms which they use without knowing anything about!

I have just had a letter from a rather famous writer and historian in U.S.A., which looks as if I had unconsciously transferred a thought to him; and in Lord Howe Island, Mr. C. W. Whiting will endorse what I say when I affirm that in the days before Governor de Chair initiated wireless there, the quad roon islanders of the northern part were able to tell you, almost to the hour, when the steamer would arrive, without any ordinary means of knowing. Years ago, when reporting to a big London house upon the Communist trend here, I em ployed a clever girl lip-reader, who at tended secret meetings of the American subsidised agents of dissolution, with me, in weird disguises; and under the pro tection of two American cut-throats I had subsidised for the occasion. She told me that she could sometimes read what they were saying without being able to see their lips, or even faces. Un consciously, their words came to her either by her hearing being suddenly magnified many times, or by some other means unknown to herself. Butterflies will find their mates in some such ex traordinary way. The great J. Jenner Weir, then H.M. Comptroller-General of Customs: and a friend of Darwin, and mentioned in his books, told my father, in my hearing, one one occasion, how female butterflies, in a cardboard box in his office in London, somehow at tracted males for over sixty miles around.

We have something still to learn; so we need not give all our time to “pat ball” games, and listening to the me chanical “music” of the wireless!

I am, etc.,

Arthur J. Vogan.