All my efforts were useless; we had to abandon the experiment. The command was certainly understood; but M. N. retired, convinced that it had not been understood, and that even the trance was a sham! _Automatic Writing._ Sometimes the working of the telepathic impulse is of a more apparently mysterious kind. We have seen that Mr. Beard was fully conscious of the action of a restraining force; and Mrs. Thaw, who was in a condition little if at all removed from the normal, appears also to have been aware of what she was doing, if perhaps without explicit recognition of her motives at the time of performing the prescribed actions. But in the various cases now to be described the telepathic impulse seems never to have affected the normal consciousness of the percipient at all; and the results produced through the agency of his organism were due to no recognised volition on his part. The intelligence directing his hand was an intelligence working below and apart from his ordinary life. Now this subterranean intelligence presents many points of analogy with the secondary consciousness of the hypnotic subject; in both states we find indications of thought and will distinct from those of waking life, and of a memory not shared with that life. Moreover, it has been shown experimentally, by Mr. Edmund Gurney,[46] Professor Pierre Janet,[47] and others, that the consciousness which makes itself known through planchette is, in certain persons at any rate, identical with the consciousness found in the hypnotic trance, so far as the test of a common memory can be relied upon to prove identity. The superior susceptibility to telepathic influences, already referred to, of the hypnotic subject, may perhaps, therefore, in the light of these later experiments, be found to indicate a superior susceptibility of those parts of the brain whose workings lie below the ordinary consciousness, and reveal themselves only in the activities of trance and automatism. The following is an illustrative case. The account is derived from contemporary notes, made by the late Mr. P. H. Newnham, Vicar of Maker, Devonport, of a series of experiments conducted by himself and his wife during eight months in 1871.[48] Mr. Newnham would write, in a book kept for the purpose, a question of the purport of which Mrs. Newnham was in ignorance; and Mrs. Newnham, holding her hand on a planchette, would write an answer to the question. The conditions of the experiments are described by Mr. Newnham, in an account written in 1884, as follows:-- No. 24.