THE MIND THAT SEES the tragedy of its Twin

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 637, 13 April 1929, Page 18

THE MIND THAT SEES the tragedy of its Twin

p 'RAINS & BQD/ESDUPL/CA TED hr

Why William Irvine was Able to Visualise His Brother’s Death

YOU will find the body of my brother Thomas lying in a pool of water surrounded by stones. He has a razor with him, but he has not cut his throat. To reach that water he had to climb through a fences. William Irvine, twin brother to Thomas, who was missed recently from Rook wood State Hospital, made this statement to the police who were searching, and when the brother’s body was recovered —the details were cabled to New Zealand —the prophecy was borne out to the letter. “Just a case of telepathy,” says the layman or, more briefly, “second sight”; but William Irvine has set the psychologists a problem which they cannot dismiss so easily. Most scientists, says the Sydney “Sun,” are disposed to look critically at the suggestion of telepathy. They do not disbelieve it, neither do they positively believe. Much remains to be proved, and they are leaving the burden of proof to the spiritualist and to the Society of Psychical Research, which has collected such a volume of critically examined cases of telepathy that many of its supporters charge scientists with having rejected telepathy unscientifically—-that is, with having rejected it without a trial. Hundreds of authenticated cases of telepathy are available, aQd one plausible theory which claims to explain them is that they are dependent upon ether waves of an abnormally high frequency, as yet unknown to science. These waves operate upon highly sensitive ganglia in the human brain, which are capable of acting as transmitting and receiving sets of o, delicacy much finer than radio. In the case of twins, just as every part of their bodies are duplicate, so these ganglia would be as identical as

it is possible for any two things to be, and twins would be able to “tune iu” to each other’s telepathic wave-length probably with much greater facility than any other pair of sympathetic and telepathic human beings. The best scientific explanation of telepathy is that there is a subconscious reasoning. For example, if two sisters live together all their lives, eating the same food, meeting the same people, reading the same books, as far as is humanly possible both their brains would be stored with the same ideas, and it would be possible for one of them to predict the action of the other under a given set of circumstances, simply by analysing her own probable actions. Telepathy, say these scientists, is simply a subconscious and perfectly honest self-analy-sis of this sort. For example, it would have been possible for William Irvine to predict that his twin had not cut his throat, because he knew that he himself could not go to that extremity. -

To understand twinship it is first of all necessary to realise that there are two distinct species of twins. Both, of course, are born together; but one type, known as fraternal twins, result from separate ova. and are very little, if any, more closely related than ordinary brothers or sisters. The other type results from the splitting of a single ovum by the entry of two germinal cells, and it is here that one finds the really close ties of twinship. The latter, known as uniovular twins, are invariably of the same sex, while fraternal twins may be of different sexes.

Brother and sister twins have provided endless material for the novelist, who delights in talking of “the mystic bonds of twinship,” whereas in fact they are no more than the normal bonds that exist between brother and sister.

“Twin” has come to be used as a synonym for “duplicate,” but nowhere in the study of man do we find both such complete duplication of individuality as among twins. Normal twins often share unusual beauty and high intellectual powers. Although the differences between them are usually plain to their relatives and

to those who are intimate with them, strangers are quite unable to tell them apart.

In England at the present time there are at least one pair of twin sisters who, even in their own minds, are uncertain which is which. A mix-up occuired when they were babies and were bathed together, and their mother, in spite of anguished brainsearchings, could not be quite sure afterwards if she put the distinguishing ribbons back on the right wrists. Now, whether Jean is in fact Jean, and Alice in fact Alice, is a problem that will never be positively solved. In later childhood, when personality begins to develop, parents and relatives are able to detect slight differences of expression which help in distinguishing one from the other. A ; scientific survey of 90 pairs of twins, | varying in age from a few months to 50 years, showed that even in cases where twins were exact bodily replicas of each other, even to such matters as a tiny mole on the lip. or to the intonation of the voice, except in one ! case their handwriting differed. In the case that differed, the twin brothers, who attended a university, could not tell their own handwriting, and could not tell afterwards who had taken which set of notes.

A frequent difference in uniovular twins is found in the singing voice. Although the intonation of the speaking voice is usually the same, they usually sing in slightly different keys.

It is common In twins to find that every expression in one is matched by a corresponding expression in the other. Two girls, for instance, suddenly found that they could not go downstairs quickly. They had always been able to run downstairs, but suddenly, at the age of 20, the disability settled simultaneously upon both of them. In another case, twin brothers were attacked one night by toothache. A visit was paid to the dentist, who had to extract the same tooth from each of their heads.

One precocious pair of English girl twins —they are now 17 —both showed unusual mental development. At the age of three they began to study English, French and Esperanto. They went to college together, became leaders of the other girls in sport. At an early age they were tested in dictation, each being asked to spell a list of 50 words. Without a single variation they succeeded in spelling the same words correctly, and made the identical mistakes when they went wrong. There is quite a classic case of a doctor who attended a man in Paris for rheumatic ophthalmia. The patient said: “At this instant my twin brother must be having an ophthalmia like mine.” The twin was living in Vienna, and a letter a few days later said: "I have my ophthalmia; you must have yours.” All of which shows how closely it is possible for twin bodies and minds to work together.