How much more easy it is to explain such a case on the score of coincidence! Of course, mother and daughter, with father absent, and absent in the midst of what they thought was danger, would go to bed anxiously thinking of him. They would sleep lightly because of the worry. Any slight unusual noise would wake them, and at once the thought of father and his danger would occur to them. If the noise was sudden, and not repeated, and therefore inexplicable to one awakened out of sleep, they would probably be so disturbed that it is easy to understand that they would arise at once and seek each other's company. Their meeting, therefore, in the doorway between their rooms would be readily explicable. Neither would say much {146} about the subject uppermost in her thoughts in order to shield the other. The telegram in the morning would throw a glow of retrospective light on the events and seem to give an entirely new significance to their thoughts. The whole affair, though only a coincidence, would seem to be a demonstration of telepathy. Even more marvelous instances of coincidence, in which there was no question of anything more than coincidence, have been related. The English Psychical Research Society reported the case of a young man sent to find some trace of his brother who had disappeared mysteriously from a steamer sailing from Plymouth to Lisbon. On board the steamer late at night he stood by the rail thinking of his lost brother and wondering what could possibly have become of him. Suddenly as he looked down into the ocean a body came bobbing up out of the waves almost directly under his gaze. He reported it to the officers of the vessel and it was grappled for and lifted aboard. It proved to be the body of his brother. Is this an example of telepathy, that is, of the mental influence of the perturbed spirit of the live brother upon the dead brother's body floating below the surface? No one would stretch supposed telepathy to that extent. The steamer disturbed the body which had been floating below the surface, as bodies do, gradually developing within themselves the gases of decomposition. After a time any slight disturbance, as, for instance, the booming of a cannon or the passage of even a small boat, will bring a body up. It so happened that the brother was on the spot, and actually thinking of the body, but that was the merest coincidence. There was no connection of cause and effect. Most of the cases of so-called telepathy can be explained in this way. As we have said, no source of error is so copious as that of concluding that because one thing happens after another therefore the second is caused by the first. People who are so inclined will still continue to accept such a notion of connection of cause and effect, however, and we shall have many cases of supposed telepathy exploited for us on no better grounds than this.