PHOTOGRAPHING THOUGHT.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1290, 19 November 1896, Page 8

PHOTOGRAPHING THOUGHT.

DR. BARADUC'S DISCOVERY

Dr. Baraduc, of Paris, has announced that lie can photograph thought. He is a practising physician, an eleetropath. His professional studies led him to the discovery which he had just announced at a meeting of the Socieie de IViediciue, in Paris. Let us try to disentangle that discovery as much as possible from the technical labyrinth in which he well-nigh buried it away fr >m the popular comprehension. This article will deal with his experiments and his conclusions rather than with his arguments.

Dr Baraduc lirst produces for your inspection a couple of magneto metres, which he lays upon a table. These are two little cases, graduated to 3GO degrees, on each of which moves a copper needle as sensitive as possible, but isolated from all exterior contact in a small glass vessel. No breath, therefore, no slightest clis placement of the air, can affect it. You are asked to hold your open hands in such a way that the lingers all point to one or the other of these magno-metres, and to observe what follows. At the end of about two minutes, if you are a person of normal temperament, you will find that the needle opposite your left hand has fled five degrees away, the other, opposite your right hand, has approached by 15 degrees. Now what has produced this double displacement ? Evidently some force, fluid or wave, call it what you will, of which you are the fountain head, enters the left needle and makes a circuit back through the right. Dr. Baraduc calls thi3 vital force. It gives testimony •to its existence in a very striking manner. Between each of the magneto-metres and your hands a sensitized plate is introduced, the room is darkened, so that all light is excluded save a faiut red light, which, a 3 is well known, cannot make any impression on the salts of silver. Now, it you dip the plates in the developing basin you will find that the right one presents a curious speckled appearance, while the left surface is almost unbroken blackness on one side and a mottled white on the other. This proves that the vital force bears rays of light and that it has passed through both glass vessels. The two plates are there to furnish all the tiecesary evidence. Dr Baraduc calls the vital force, when passing out of the left hand, expiration, and when passing back to the right hand; aspiration. Now, you will remember that the expiration moved the needle five degrees for ward, while aspiration drew it 15 degrees backward. There remains, tlieiefore, a difference of ten, which is somehow accumulated in our human reservoir. This is what constitutes psychical force, widen can, by a mere effort of will, radiate out of us. _ Now comes another experiment. Tne radiometers are removed and are replaced by a simple photographic plate. You are told to extend your hand in the direction of this plate and to think intently upon something. In course of tone, which may vary with the individual from a few minutes to two hours, a very remarkable phenomenon will have taken place. The sensitized plate will have become impressed with a Fort < f luminous fog, in which fonns may be more or less dimly traced. The experiment is a hard one, and at its end you will find yourself mentally and physically exhausted. As examples of this phenomenon two plates were submitted by the doctor for examination. In one there could be faintly discerned a child’s head, which was what the individual had in mind. He was a normal and ordinary individual. It is true that the head was no more distinct than the shapes you sometimes imagine you see in clouds, but Dr Baraduc had an ace up his sleeve in the second picture. This was startlingly distinct. A sulernnvis iged Oriental, with long black beard and moustache, with his head arrayed in a turban, was the object photoera- hod upon it. Dr Baraduc explained that teas was produced by placing a medium in front of the sensitized plate. A medium, he said, undoubtedly possesses a faculty of exteriorizing his inner seif which i 3 greater than that of ordinary mortals. This interests, but it must be confessed that Dr Baraduc, intoxicated by his discovery, has allowed his imagination to run off into delirium. He has obtained photographs, cr psychicones, as he calls them, of men and women under the

influence of various emotions—joy, grief, anger, etc., —and he has catalogued and coordinated these various plates as if ihey represented the microbes of all human passions. From them he has evolved an entire system of mystic and moral philosophy, which will soon be made known to the world in a large volume. —New York Herald.