and found there the very opinion which he had been most earnestly endeavoring to recover, lying in his own handwriting. There was no doubt about it whatever, and this opinion he at once saw was the very thing which he had been anxious to be able to give. A case was put on record of a very similar kind only a few years ago by a gentleman well known in London, the Rev. John De Liefde, a Dutch clergyman. This gentleman mentioned it on the authority of a fellow-student who had been at the college at which he studied in early life. He had been attending a class in mathematics, and the professor said to his class one day: "A question of great difficulty has been referred to me by a banker, a very complicated question of accounts, which they have not themselves been able to bring to a satisfactory issue, and they have asked my assistance. I have been trying, and I cannot resolve it. I have covered whole sheets of paper with calculations, and have not been able to make it out. Will you try?" He gave it as a sort of problem to his class, and said he should be extremely obliged to any one who would bring him the solution by a certain day. This gentleman tried it over and over again; he covered many slates with figures, but could not succeed in resolving it. He was a little put on his mettle, and very much desired to attain the solution; but he went to bed on the night before the solution, if attained, was to be given in, without having succeeded. In the morning, when he went to his desk, he found the whole problem worked out in his own hand. He was perfectly satisfied that it was his own hand; and this was a very curious part of it—that the result was correctly obtained by a process very much shorter than any he had tried. He had covered three or four sheets of paper in his attempts, and this was all worked out upon one page, and correctly worked, as the result proved. He inquired of his "hospita," as she was called—I believe our English equivalent is bedmaker, the woman who attended to his rooms—and she said she was certain that no one had entered his room during the night. It was perfectly clear that this had been worked out by himself.
Now, there are many cases of this kind, in which the mind has obviously worked more clearly and more successfully in this automatic condition, when left entirely to itself, than when we have been cudgelling our brains, so to speak, to get the solution. I have paid a good deal of attention to this subject, in this way: I have taken every opportunity that occurred to me of asking inventors and artists—creators in various departments of art—musicians, poets, and painters, what their experience has been in regard to difficulties which they have felt, and which they have after a time overcome. And the experience has been almost always the same, that they have set the result which they have wished to obtain strongly before their minds, just as we do when we try to recollect something we have forgotten; they think of every thing that can lead to it; but, if they do not succeed, they put it by for a time, and give their minds to something else, and endeavor to ob-
