THE SECRET TRANSMISSION OF NEWS.
THERE have always been prophets in the world who have professed to be able to predict the course of events, and whose pretensions have been more or less successful; but there is another phenomenon which not nnfrequently forces itself upon the notice of Europeans in their dealings with men of other races, and this is the extraordinary and accurate know- ledge which they sometimes possess of events happening at a distance, and of which they cannot apparently have received information through ordinary channels of communication, though when news of the events subsequently arrived it fully confirmed the native rumours.
Some years ago we remember reading a statement that at the time of the disasters in Afghanistan in 1842 it was reported in India that the whole British army had been annihilated with the exception of one man, several days before the Europeans received the news from other sources. If this story stood alone it might have been imagined that a pre- arranged plot had been known in India ; but similar stories are not infrequent. A lady, writing in the Spectator of February 15th last, mentions that the death of the Amir of Afghanistan was known in the bazaars in October, 1901, well in advance of the official news ; and also that when the ' Roumania was wrecked, it was known on a Saturday that a big steamer carrying piece-goods had been wrecked in the Red Sea, though the agents of the line did not receive the news till the following Monday. News travels with equal celerity in Africa. We read in Wilson's "Behind the Scenes in the Transvaal" (p. 85) :—" Again and again have Kaffirs reported events hours and even days before the news could possibly have got through by the ordinary channels. I remember, for example, how the Kaffirs in Pretoria detailed the account of the capture of Malaboch at least four hours before the first telegram arrived in Pretoria; and numbers of people who have passed through the experience of native wars in South Africa have testified to similar instances. It may be that the items of news are shouted from hill to hill, as suggested by some matter-of-fact persons who do not know the Kaffir or his country, but it is passing strange that no white person ever appears to have heard this shouting, not even in districts where every white man understands the Kaffir language as thoroughly as his own. Whatever the true explanation may be, it has not been brought forward yet, and the fact remains that the Kaffirs have some means, unknown to whites, by which they can transmit intelligence vast distances under conditions that preclude the possibility of their having employed any agency that we are familiar with." Reuter's agent, telegraphing from Bloemfontein on June 14th, says that the Boers " had an excellent intelligence system, as is well known by now. Their scouts, or spies, as they call them, were so well posted that if a British column or convoy moved from any post, all the commandos within seventy miles knew it the same day, thus giving them time to prepare for attack, or to clear off. News of the route of march of the column or convoy was sent from commando to commando, all being soon acquainted with our movements." That the Boers employed Kaffirs to keep them informed of British movements scarcely admits of question. The present writer has been told by a friend who knows South Africa well that it is there said that the Kaffirs have a peculiar kind of horn that can be heard at an immense distance, and is used to transmit intelligence (presumably by a code of signals), but that the sound would not be noticed by any one who did not know what it was ; and that news thus received is taken up and dis- seminated by runners. But this seems to be popular rumour, and conjecture rather than explanation. We believe that during the New Zealand War it was equally impossible for the British troops to carry out any movements unknown to the natives, who were always fully informed of and prepared to meet them. This is no new thing in war, for we are told that when the King of Syria called together his people, and inquired who had betrayed his plans to the enemy, one of them answered, " None, my lord, 0 king ; but Elisha, the prophet that is in Israel, telleth the king of Israel the words that thou speakest in thy bedchamber" (2 Kings vi. 12). In the same way the attempts of daring travellers to penetrate into Thibet without permission have usually failed, for how-
• ever carefully they may have arranged their plans, they are always met at the most unexpected places by the Thibetan guards, who make them prisoners, or compel them to return.
The explanations usually given of this rapid diffusion of in- telligence, to some of which we have already referred, only cover a portion of the facts ; and while we may admit the probability of easily explained means of communication in certain cases, it seems not improbable that there may be not one but several modes of communicating intelligence to a distance, which were known to the ancients, but the know- ledge of which has not descended to, or has not yet been re- discovered by, the scientific men of modern Europe, though this knowledge may well have been perpetuated among some of the descendants of ancient races whom we are too apt to despise as " savages " or "niggers." There is a tradition among the Ojibbeways of Lake Superior, recorded by a German traveller named Kohl, and made use of by Longfellow in his " Hiawatha," that the coming of the French to the St. Lawrence was revealed to one of their medicine-men in a vision, and that a deputation of several canoes set forth, and after a voyage of many weeks, during which time they passed through the territories of numerous friendly tribes who had heard nothing of the coming of the white people, they actually met the French pioneers, and found everything as the seer had described. Thought-reading may sometimes account for presentiments, but hardly for such a case as this, unless we assume that im- pressions in the universal ether may make themselves felt at any distance by persons who are capable of perceiving them, even when there seems to be no connecting link whatever. We talk of ideas being " in the air," and occasionally inven- tions are made, and even books written, so similar that it would have been supposed that one person had copied directly from another, if this had not been shown to be impossible under the circumstances. The original Greek idea of "Fame" was that of a report universally diffused, which nevertheless could not be traced to its original source. But apart from these vague notions, which lie at present just a little beyond the self- imposed limits of modern science, there are certain phases of unusually rapid transmission of intelligence which may perhaps be explained by optical effects. The heliograph was employed by the Arabs to transmit intelligence from city to city throughout their Empire nine hundred years ago; and there is a curious passage in the writings of Cornelius Agrippa, who lived about the time of Henry VIII., which may relate to the heliograph (the moon being substituted for the sun, as a blind, to throw the uninitiated off the track of the secret), or else may relate to some other more or less similar means of transmitting intelligence, probably derived from ancient sources, which came down to the time of Agrippa, but which did not descend to our own time. Agrippa alludes to the magic lantern and the camera obscura, and proceeds : "If any one shall take images artificially painted, or written letters, and in a clear light set them against the beams of the full moon. whose resemblance being multiplied in the dian.
and caught upward, and reflected back again with the beams of the moon, any other man that is privy to the thing, at a long distance, sees, reads, and knows them in the very Compass and Circle of the Moon, which Art of declaring Secrets is indeed very profitable for Towns and Cities that are besieged, being a thing which Pythagoras long since did often do, and which is not unknown to some in these days ; I will not except myself" (" Three Books of Occult Philosophy," London, 1651, pp. 15-16). Here we have nothing more, what- ever may be the real phenomena alluded to, than some optical contrivance on the same footing with the magic lantern and the camera obscura. We may perhaps compare with this statement of Agrippa the account given by the philosopher Kant of Swedenborg's perception of the fire at Stockholm in September, 1756, from Gothenburg, three hundred miles dis- tant. About six in the evening Swedenborg went out and returned pale and anxious, saying that a terrible fire was raging in Stockholm, which had already destroyed the house of one of his friends, and that his own house was in danger. He went out several times, and at last announced, at eight o'clock, that the fire had been extinguished three doors from his house. All the particulars of the fire which he had related were exactly confirmed by the news which reached Gothenburg afterwards, and by subsequent inquiries at Stockholm. One of the most interesting features of this narrative, the authenticity of which, as Kant points out, cannot reasonably be called in question, is the fact that Swedenborg seems to have found it necessary to go out of doors in order to observe the progress of the conflagration. Is it possible that the picture of what was taking place in Stockholm was mirrored in the sky in some manner which was perceptible to a man whose perceptions were developed in such an unusual manner as appears to have been the case with Swedenborg
The phenomena which we have selected to illustrate our present subject are stated to have occurred in comparatively modern times, and are all, we believe, as well authenticated as can be expected in the case of unusual events which have not been subjected to actual scientific investigation. Admitting their apparent authenticity, it is not to be imagined that there is anything more miraculous in them than in the magnet,
telegraph, telephone, X-rays, or even more familiar commonplaces of our everyday life, most of which would have appeared " miraculous" to our ancestors of only a century ago. Probably the narrators may have omitted some particulars which might have enabled us to give some plausible explana- tion of the cases of secret telegraphy which they have recorded, but they do not seem to be all explicable by one cause only. Thought-transference, spontaneous or artificial, may sometimes account for the perception of an enemy's plans in war-time ; but the cases of Cornelius Agrippa and Swedenborg seem due rather to optical phenomena of some unusual or imperfectly understood description. With these we may perhaps connect the phenomena of mirages, stories of the appearance of armies fighting in the air (for the usual explanation of these being only a superstitious embellishment of the Aurora. Borealis is not very convincing), and the appearances said to have been witnessed on the scene of Marathon and other great battles for years afterwards. Other cases of abnormal perception of events may possibly be due to the imperfect working of faculties usually in abeyance in our ordinary waking state, but which may be, as has been conjectured, faculties which the human race enjoyed at an earlier stage in the history of man, but which have since fallen into disuse ; or possibly, dawning faculties which will become fully developed in future races of men; or, thirdly, faculties, in what we may call a larval condition, which do not pertain to our present life at all, but to some other stage in our existence, though potentially present, or on rare occasions partially active, even here and now. So little is yet known of the real nature of man that there are many problems about which we can only say with Hamlet:—
" There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
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