“Your incident is a typical example of cerebral induction from a source
containing stored cerebricity. I use this word, not to be found in
my dictionaries, as expressing the brain-cell power corresponding to
electricity. Think how long it was before we had attained any real
conception of the laws that govern the wonderful agent, which now works
in harness with the other trained and subdued forces! It is natural
that cerebricity should be the last of the unweighable agencies to be
understood. The human eye had seen heaven and earth and all that in them
is before it saw itself as our instruments enable us to see it. This
fact of yours, which seems so strange to you, belongs to a great series
of similar facts familiarly known now to many persons, and before
long to be recognized as generally as those relating to the electric
telegraph and the slaving `dynamo.'
“What! you cannot conceive of a charge of cerebricity fastening itself
on a letter-sheet and clinging to it for weeks, while it was shuffling
about in mail-bags, rolling over the ocean, and shaken up in railroad
cars? And yet the odor of a grain of musk will hang round a note or a
dress for a lifetime. Do you not remember what Professor Silliman says,
in that pleasant journal of his, about the little ebony cabinet which
Mary, Queen of Scots, brought with her from France,--how 'its drawers
still exhale the sweetest perfumes'? If they could hold their sweetness
for more than two hundred years, why should not a written page retain
for a week or a month the equally mysterious effluence poured over
it from the thinking marrow, and diffuse its vibrations to another
excitable nervous centre?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account