A sensitive perceived in a crystal the
following scene: a large steamer, flying a flag of three
horizontal bars, black, white and red, and bearing the name
Leutschland, was sailing in mid-ocean. The boat was suddenly
enveloped in smoke; a great number of sailors, passengers and men
in uniform rushed to the upper deck; and the boat went down.
Eight days afterwards, the newspapers announced the accident to
the Deutschland, whose boiler had burst, obliging the steamboat
to stand to.
The evidence of a man like Dr. Maxwell, especially when we have
to do with a so-to-speak personal incident, possesses an
importance on which it is needless to insist. We have here,
therefore, several days beforehand, the very clear prevision of
an event which, moreover, in no way concerns the percipient: a
curious detail, but one which is not uncommon in these cases. The
mistake in reading Leutschland for Deutschland, which would have
been quite natural in real life, adds a note of probability and
authenticity to the phenomenon. As for the final act, the
foundering of the vessel in the place of a simple heaving to, we
must see in this, as Dr. J. W. Pickering and W. A. Sadgrove
suggest, "the subconscious dramatization of a subliminal
inference of the percipient." Such dramatization, moreover, are
instinctive and almost general in this class of visions.
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