_MENTAL TELEGRAPHY_ _A MANUSCRIPT WITH A HISTORY_ NOTE TO THE EDITOR.—By glancing over the enclosed bundle of rusty old manuscript, you will perceive that I once made a great discovery: the discovery that certain sorts of things which, from the beginning of the world, had always been regarded as merely ‘curious coincidences’—that is to say, accidents—were no more accidental than is the sending and receiving of a telegram an accident. I made this discovery sixteen or seventeen years ago, and gave it a name—‘Mental Telegraphy.’ It is the same thing around the outer edges of which the Psychical Society of England began to grope (and play with) four or five years ago, and which they named ‘Telepathy.’ Within the last two or three years they have penetrated towards the heart of the matter, however, and have found out that mind can act upon mind in a quite detailed and elaborate way over vast stretches of land and water. And they have succeeded in doing, by their great credit and influence, what I could never have done—they have convinced the world that mental telegraphy is not a jest, but a fact, and that it is a thing not rare, but exceedingly common. They have done our age a service—and a very great service, I think. In this old manuscript you will find mention of an extraordinary experience of mine in the mental telegraphic line, of date about the year 1874 or 1875—the one concerning the Great Bonanza book. It was this experience that called my attention to the matter under consideration. I began to keep a record, after that, of such experiences of mine as seemed explicable by the theory that minds telegraph thoughts to each other. In 1878 I went to Germany and began to write the book called _A Tramp Abroad_. The bulk of this old batch of manuscript was written at that time and for that book. But I removed it when I came to revise the volume for the press; for I feared that the public would treat the thing as a joke and throw it aside, whereas I was in earnest. At home, eight or ten years ago, I tried to creep in under shelter of an authority grave enough to protect the article from ridicule—the _North American Review_. But Mr. Metcalf was too wary for me. He said that to treat these mere ‘coincidences’ seriously was a thing which the _Review_ couldn’t dare to do; that I must put either my name or my _nom de plume_ to the article, and thus save the _Review_ from harm. But I couldn’t consent to that; it would be the surest possible way to defeat my desire that the public should receive the thing seriously, and be willing to stop and give it some fair degree of attention. So I pigeon-holed the MS., because I could not get it published anonymously.