Evening star., 1937-02-06
STARS, MEN AND ATOMS
otebook of Science Progress in Field,
Laboratory and Study.
BY THOMAS r. HENRY

Take a deck Of IS cards-five aces,
five kings, five queens, five jacks and
five tens.
Shuttle the pack, lay it face down on
the table, and have somebody in the
next room try to guess the cards in
order as they are turned over, one by
one.
According to the law Of chance, the
guesser should name correctly one card
out of every five, or just trifle better
that is, If the stunt was repeated 20 or
80 times.
Suppose he consistently named 10 or
better out of each set Of Is.
That is what happens, time and time
again. in DR.. J. B. Rhine's parapsycho-
logical laboratory at Duke University.
and whatever may be the eventual ex-
PLANTATION, the experiments represent the
most scientific approach yet made to
the perplexing problems of clairvoyance.
telepathy and second sight. DR.. Rhine
described some Of his amazing results at
a meeting here last Winter and since
then, according to report just received
from him, has continued the same sort
OF experiments with equal success.
The procedure is approximately as
outlined above except that DIR. Rhines
cards contain geometric designs instead
of the playing card faces and he seldom
gets quite as good guessing as l0 out OF
IS. He is satisfied if 1t Is better than
chance by a ratio of 1 to $4,000. His
work represents an effort to work toward
an explanation of the phenomena OF
telepathy through rigidly controlled ex-
periments which are made as simple as
possible and from which all possibility
Of fraud Is ruled out.
The results have satisfied the Duke
professor that some persons have a
faculty which cannot be explained on q
basis of the known senses OF man. He
calls it extra-sensory perception, without
any effort at present to define it more
precisely The work now has been IN
progress for six years, and in connection
with it somewhat complex mathematl-
cal procedure has been developed.
The successes do not depend on any
clues which might come from the cards
themselves. They are just as pro-
nounced when the reader" is in an
other room, in another laboratory across
the campus somewhere else In the city
of Durham or $50 miles away. Whatever
the unknown faculty may be, 1t does not
seem to be affected by distance. This, ne
points out, seems to invalidate the
theory of "waves" passing between the
minds of the person conducting the ex-
pertinent and the reader. such waves
would grow weaker with the distance
traversed. It also invalidates the theory
of hypersensitivity Of the known senses
ON the part of the successful card read
ers, since the effect Of this also would
tend to fall off with distance.
The most remarkable experiment. re-
ported by DR.. Rhine is his "Junalaska
series" The subject was stationed at
mountain resort $50 miles from Durham.
The conductor of the experiment,
graduate instructor in psychology, was
in the Duke laboratory. The two hao
synchronized watches.
At time agreed upon the instructor
at Duke started turning over the cards
one every three minutes. The same test
was repeated five days in succession.
At the expiration of each three minutes
Is times each day the reader noted on
. prepared form her guess as to the
card which had been turned over. The
graduate instructor at Durham recorded
on a similar form kke cards which
actually were turned over. The two
forms were compared afterward. with