CALCULATING MARVELS.

Auckland Star, Volume LV, Issue 169, 18 July 1924, Page 8

CALCULATING MARVELS.

(To the Editor.) Sir, —I see that your esteemed contributor, Mr. J. D. Leckie, believes with Sir Conau Doyle, Mr. Poynton, S.M., and M. Maeterlinck, that dogs, hor9e3, uneducated children and semi-idiotic men have the power to extract square and cube roots and give the correct answer to difficult arithmetical problems —in other words, to do instantly what ordinary human beings, even those of high education and intelligence, would take many minutes to do on < paper, while as for doing them mentally | 90 per cent of men would not even make the attempt. Now, I am a fairly gullible specimen, but this is too much for my credulity to swallow. That the things described are done I have no doubt —the evidence is overwhelming; but the means by which they are done are not disclosed. In the case of animals I suggest trickery; in the case of human beings, I believe these wonders may be attributed to the power of mind-reading, which the most ignorant may possess. Let mc give my own experience with Inaudi when he visited New Zealand r-early twenty years ago. I did not wit- j ness his platform performances, but | was privileged to have a private demon- [ stration in preparation for which I spent about half an hour in constructing an arithmetical puzzle. It was simply lrautiplication or division, the answer to it was, I think, 13,333,333. Standing close to Inaudi, I propounded my problem, and he at once began, very deliberately, to reply: One, t'irec;—then he shot mc a sudden glance, a gleam of intelligence passed between us, and with great rapidity he gave the other six threes. According to my theory, he went : slowly at first until he had got "en rapport" with mc, then he got the six figures in a flash. It is patent that in all tests of this kind the person propounding the problem has the answer to j it in his mind; if the other person is a mind-reader he can give the answer at ! ence, without calculation of siny kind. ■ This is a much more rational explanation than attributing extraordinary : powers of calculation to anyone. The ' same explanation may account for some alleged feats of memory, like one that I remember that was performed by a ' travelling wonder-worker. He asked any- ! one to produce to him about 100 lines I of print from a book or newspaper, and ] after reading it over once he was able j to repeat it from memory, first in its i proper" order, and then word for word ' backwards. The backward rpadin™ ! struck mc as being marvellous; later, I ' pronounced it impossible. After many ■ years, when I had received repeated 1 personal proof of the reality of mindreading, I concluded that this showman, like others, was a mind-reader. : The person holding the printed extract ; would naturally be checking word by word, and the showman read the person's mind, and, of course, made no mistakes. I do not condemn all memory - feats, however. Many years ago I knew a police constable in Scotland, who informed mc that he could repeat from 1 memory the whole of the Psalms of David (metrical version). As a test, on the spur of the moment, I asked him to repeat the 133 rd Psalm—of which, by the way, I knew only two lines. He promptly began and recited the psalm required. This was presumptive proof that his claim was genuine. It would have been no test had I asked for the Ist Psalm, the 23rd Psalm, or the 100 th Psalm, for at that time, practically every child in Scotland could have repeated pffhand any one of these. The constable's feat is "not an impos- ; sible one, but I confess that when I read ; that a certain Scottish boy could repeat , the whole of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation I set it down as a gross : exaggeration. There is a saying, "A \ memory like a horse." Well, I understand horses have very good memories, but their memories are confined to , things within the ranpn of aniraa] ] j understanding, and do not extend to i arithmetical problems.—l am etc., ' J, LIDDELL KELLY. {