And this reminds me now of another like sort of spiritual monition alluded to in my Proverbial Essay on "Truth in Things False," which has several times occurred to myself, as this, for example: Years ago, in Devonshire, for the first time, I was on the top of a coach passing through a town--I think it was Crediton--and I had the strange feeling that I had seen all this before: now, we changed horses just on this side of a cross street, and I resolved within myself to test the truth of the place being new to me or not, by prophesying what I should see right and left as we passed; to my consternation it was all as I had foreseen,--a market-place with the usual incidents.

Now, if reasonably asked how to account for this (and most of us have felt the like), I reply that possibly in an elevated state of health and spirits the soul may outrun the body, and literally foresee coming events both real and ideal.

But we must leave this to the Psychical Society for a judgment upon the famous Horatian philosophy of "more things in heaven and earth," &c.
* * * * * On Mr.Galton's topic of hereditary talent I have little to report as to myself.

Neither father nor mother had any leanings either towards verse or prose; but my mother was an excellent pianiste and a fair landscape painter both in oils and water-colour; also she drew and printed on stone, and otherwise showed that she came of an artistic family.

As to my father's surroundings, his brother Peter, a consul-general in Spain, wrote a tragedy called Pelayo; and I possess half-a-dozen French songs, labelled by my father "in my late dear father's handwriting," but whether or not original, I cannot tell.