Can we go further, and suggest that some of the baffling phenomena of heredity and instinct may ultimately find their origin in the telepathic transference of thought? We accept the word ‘instinct’ as an adequate explanation of the habits of sentient creatures, but it explains nothing. Every manifestation of instinct is obviously due to volition, however rudimentary――is, in other words, a mental as distinct (so far as such distinction goes) from a physical phenomenon. It is difficult to trace an “instinctive” movement to material spermatozoa or germ-cells. “The burnt child dreads the fire” as the result of its own experience, but no experience taught the baby how to use its lips at its first meal, any more than it taught the chicken how to escape from the eggshell. The “collective experience of the race”, the alleged source of these phenomena, may sooner or later be recognized as the telepathic transference from the mind of the parents of concepts derived from the previous telepathy of successive generations. It may appear at first sight fantastic to suggest that the mechanically exact habits of a mother-wasp may be the result of mental telepathy, but after all this seems a better _vera causa_ than the wasp’s-egg, a minute fraction of matter which can explain nothing in the realms of thought or of volition. Charcot’s telepathic suggestion of a hot iron by the application of a wooden ruler elicited a cry of agony, and produced a blister filled with lymph on the percipient’s arm; other experiments at the Salpêtriêre and elsewhere raised weals and other stigmata on human bodies. Can it be that this same mysterious and powerful force may come to be accepted as at any rate a partial solution of the vexed question of heredity? A baby is born with marked physical characteristics of its father or mother. During its prenatal existence you have two main factors: the minds of the parents on the one side, on the other the mind of the unborn child. The future of the little being lying under her heart forms the constant thought of the expectant mother. She thinks of it as reproducing certain characteristics of herself or of the husband she loves; the husband applies his thoughts in the same direction: and such concentrated suggestion, consciously or unconsciously conveyed, may serve to shape the child’s body as well as its mind, in accordance with the maternal or paternal hopes and desires.