Life and literary work
Daniel Babbitt Vermilye was born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1854. Columbia’s alumni catalogue records his graduation in 1873. His obituary, preserved in a family-history transcription, describes a legal career that took him from New York to Minnesota and Kansas before he returned east and worked in Columbia’s library. A contemporary Harper advertisement independently identifies the translator of From India to the Planet Mars as a member of the university library.
Vermilye later lived in Sag Harbor, New York. The same obituary records his service as a justice of the peace in East Hampton and his subsequent concentration on writing and translation. His interests included psychical research, local history and French literature; he also translated Théophile Gautier’s Journeys in Italy. He died in 1916, leaving a projected history of the Oranges in New Jersey unfinished.
Translating a disputed case
Harper & Brothers published Vermilye’s translation of From India to the Planet Mars in 1900. Flournoy, a psychologist in Geneva, had studied a medium whom he called Hélène Smith. Her trance narratives included an Indian past life and visits to Mars, accompanied by unfamiliar speech and writing. The book examined how such elaborate experiences might arise from mental processes outside ordinary awareness. Vermilye translated that investigation; he was not the observer who conducted the séances.
His contribution extended beyond rendering the French text. In a substantial translator’s preface, signed at Columbia University in July 1900, he defended psychical research against dismissal and invoked the work of F. W. H. Myers. He hoped that systematic observation might eventually illuminate the question of survival after death. He nevertheless distinguished the apparent sincerity of a medium from the explanation of her experiences, acknowledging the provisional character of competing theories. Those hopes and judgments belong to Vermilye’s introduction and should not all be assigned to Flournoy.
