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cans, and then came to apricots. Well, aren’t apricots peaches? And there are plums that are virtually apricots. I went on, either mischievously, or scientifically, pasting the peach labels on cans of plums, cherries, string beans, and succotash. I can’t quite define my motive, because to this day it has not been decided whether I am a humorist or a scientist. I think that it was mischief, but, as we go along, there will come a more respectful recognition that also it was scientific procedure.
    In the town of Derby, England—see the Derby Mercury, May 15, and following issues, 1905—there were occurrences that, to the undiscerning, will seem to have nothing to do with either peaches or succotash. In a girls’ school, girls screamed and dropped to the floor, unconscious. There are readers who will think over well-known ways of peaches and succotash, and won’t know what I am writing about. There are others, who will see “symbolism” in it, and will send me appreciations, and I won’t know what they’re writing about.
    In five days, there were forty-five instances of girls who screamed and dropped unconscious. “The girls were exceedingly weak, and had to be carried home. One child had lost strength so that she could not even sit up.” It was thought that some unknown noxious gas or vapor, was present: but mice were placed in the schoolrooms and they were unaffected. Then the scientific explanation was “mass psychology.” Having no more data to work on, it seems to me that this explanation is a fitting description. If a girl fainted, and, if, sympathetically, another girl fainted, it is well in accord with our impressions of human nature, which sees, eats, smells, thinks, loves, hates, talks, dresses, reads, and undergoes surgical operations, contagiously, to think of forty-three other girls losing consciousness, in involuntary imitativeness. There are mature persons who may feel superior to such hysteria, but so many of them haven’t much consciousness.
    In the Brooklyn Eagle, Aug. 1, 1894, there is a story of “mass psychology.” In this case, too, it seems to me that the description fits—maybe. Considering the way people live, it is natural to them to die imitatively. There was, in July, 1894, a panic in a large vineyard, at Collis, near Fresno, California. Somebody in this vineyard had dropped dead of “heart failure.” Somebody else dropped dead. A third victim had dropped and was dying. There wasn’t a scientist, with a good and sticky explanation, on the place. It will be thought amusing: but the people in this vineyard believed that something uncanny was occurring, and they fled. “Everybody has left the place, and the authorities are preparing to begin a searching investigation.” Anything more upon this subject is not findable. That is the usual experience after an announcement of a “searching investigation.”
    If something can’t be described any other way, it’s “mass psychology.” In the town of Bradford, England, in a house, in Columbia Street, 1st of March, 1923, there was one of those occasions of the congratulations, hates, malices, and gaieties, and more or less venomous jealousies that combine in the state that is said to be merry, of a wedding party. The babble of this wedding party suddenly turned to delirium. There were screams, and guests dropped to the floor, unconscious. Wedding bells—the gongs of ambulances—four persons were taken to hospitals.
    This occurrence was told of in the London newspapers, and, though strange, it seemed that the conventional explanation fitted it.
    Yorkshire Evening Argus— published in Bradford—March 3, 1923—particulars that make for restiveness against any conventional explanation—people in adjoining houses had been affected by this “mysterious malady.” Several names of families, members of which had been overcome, unaccountably, were published—Downing, Blakey, Ingram.
    If people, in different houses, and out of contact