Certainly: for in what degree can even a man’s heart compare with his brain in the supremacy it asserts over his corporeal body? It is true that the heart is essential to him, and has a great work to perform, and can do it without help from his brain, even while the body and brain sleep; but, after all, it is a mere beautiful machine--a mechanical, monotonous slave, with nothing more to recommend it to notice than its faithfulness to its hidden duty. Now let me affirm at once that the brain _is_ the soul, and when you acquiesce in this, you will see more clearly how it is worked out as a substantial truth in my wonderful experiments, or rather, as their wonderful _result_; experiments, which after all were but my intellectual knowledge reduced to a reasonable system. Very well. I commenced my experiments with this theory properly worked out in my own mind, but not substantiated with positive proof, _that the soul and the brain were synonymous_. Now the soul never dies--consequently the brain never dies! It decays, and resolves itself into its constituent atoms, but it leaves behind it what I will term _brain-ether_, which is absolutely indestructible and immortal, and consequently lasts through all time. Then came the thought--“If the brain-ether exists, where shall I find it?” I wanted to know this one thing; then I could work out the ideas I had in my mind, following them up with experiments to prove the correctness of my premises. Just think for a few moments of the vast encyclopædia of knowledge stored in a human brain of ordinary calibre; think of the scenes, the faces, the technical knowledge, the music, the skill, and the secrets that human brain contains, and which, when the body decays, are turned into ethereal memories--memories _not lost_, but stored up in the brain-ether for ever. Now it occurred to me, that if I could only ascertain what became of this brain-ether as the body decayed, that I might secure some of it, and with the help of modern scientific apparatus, so far capture its treasury of knowledge as to make that latent knowledge of incalculable service to mankind. For many weeks I thought of places likely to be the earthly resting-place of what I considered to be the fugitive brain-ether, and, like every other mortal who has essayed the same intellectual feat, I failed because I had the words, “The soul has fled,” ever present in my mind. Naturally, when a human being dies, if one says, “His soul has fled,” the person spoken to directly assumes that the soul has left the body, and gone no one knows whither. But, being scientifically artful, I took an opposite and antagonistic view of the usually accepted answer, and said to myself: “Now suppose the soul has not fled, but is still present in the cranium in the form of brain-ether.”