having caused shipwrecks, storms, and
tempests by means of muttered charms and mightily
unpleasant spells; to having seen imps of
unearthly form come at the call to be
nourished by the milk of aged crones; to having
witnessed the transformation of hares, birds,
cats, wolves, &c., into living men and women,
with only two legs and no more hair than their
neighbours; to actual intercourse with Satan;
to turning straws and broomsticks—goats, too,
on occasions—into jolly little horses, not at all
particular about Macadam; to having been
present when afflicted youths and maidens
vomited crooked pins, rusty nails, toads, mice,
and other like objects. Credible witnesses were
they, persons of unsullied good faith and the
best of reputations, with no object to gain, no
purpose to serve; yet they swore to things which
they never saw, nor could by any possibility
have seen, and their testimony was accepted
against the direct evidence of reason and
common sense. And those who doubted or
denied, ran great chance of losing their lives as
the consequence of their temerity. Happily
times are more liberal at present, and I may
say my little word of denial of the modern
phase of witchcraft, with no greater danger
than that of being called a Sadducee by my
amiable friend and contemporary, the Spiritual
Magazine, or a learned pig, or a pig not
learned, or a Homo Talpæus, according as he
is religiously or facetiously abusive. The
penalty does not seem to me very terrific. It
would have been different two hundred years
ago, when my amiable friend would have had
me pricked and swum for a wizard, because not
believing in witchcraft, and finally strung up to
the "leafless tree" as a warning to all misguided
Sadducees and atheists.

Yet the course of time has brought round the
old tablets on the wheel; the spiritualists, who
believe in the physically impossible, by means
of bodiless agents; the Sadducees, who take
their stand on the Positive Sciences, and
relegate the souls of the dead to a far different
and far more solemn audience than is to be found
in a modern drawing-room, or the palace of an
emperor. The first prefer imagination to logic,
and superstition to criticism; the second receive
the testimony of nature in preference to the
fallacious phantasies of man, and believe in
reason rather than in credulity.

The initial article of faith to which the world
is required to subscribe, is the intellectual
development of tables. I, the writer of this
paper, have seen tables move about the room,
with (apparently) only the tips of fingers on
them, waltz on one leg, and rub themselves with
a caressing dog-like motion against the medium.
I have seen them tip and tumble and rise some
four feet from the floor, and I have heard them
rap out common-place sentences by means of the
alphabet; but I have not, for all that, become
convinced of the supernatural character of such
phenomena, nor do I assent to the proposition
that the tables did these things of "their own
volition." Every rational being knows, as
certainly as that two bodies can never occupy the
same space at the same time, or that two and
two can never be more nor less than four, that
lifeless matter cannot move without some
external application of force, or withdrawal of
support. I also know that imposture is the
easiest thing in the world to be practised, even
by persons irreproachable and above suspicion;
for imposture may, and often does, spring from
self-deception quite as much as from intentional
deceit. I, as a sceptic, may not be able, or
allowed, to detect the imposture on the spot; yet,
inasmuch as I am told that a law of nature, as
certainly ascertained and as certainly unchangeable
as the motions of the planets and as the
rules of arithmetic, has been violated—in other
words, that something impossible has happened
—the inference of imposture is inevitable:
especially when persons are present who might be
the impostors. At that west-central house of
which I have made mention in a previous
article,* I saw all the ordinary phenomena of
table tipping and moving, performed by distinct
mechanical agency; and in my own house I
have for my own amusement and better
convincing, manipulated a moderately-sized round
table, much as I have seen such table manipulated
by professed mediums. I have not been
able to do all that they have done, or said that
they have done; but I am not yet an expert in
sleight of hand, and I am learning without a
master. One thing I have proved: that it is
quite possible to tilt a table to an angle of forty-
five degrees, yet not move book, or vase, or box,
or pencil that may chance to be on it; that is,
if the table be covered with a velvet or cloth
cover. Let some of my readers try this for
themselves and they will find themselves able to
tilt a table to as acute an angle as the medium did
who made this feat a proof of spiritual agency.
This is one of the spiritualists' "facts," which
no one thinks of verifying for himself, and which
are therefore allowed to drift into the category
of proofs, unquestioned and uncontradicted.
What more is done by mediums than what I,
or any other can do, I believe to be done by
trick. I do not think the cat hatched a cat-
duck out of the hen's eggs, and I do believe in
the universality of natural laws, which do not
grant a table independent volition, intelligent
action, the power of foretelling events, or the
gift of thought-reading. Rather than accept
the stultification of nature, I accept the
theory of deception—conscious and unconscious.
An amiable friend of mine speaks of a table
weighing twenty pounds, which made a leap
over the heads of an assembled party, and
afterwards rested lightly on the head of one
of the company. He says this was done by the
table, of its own mahogany free will, without
any external or mechanical agency. I say it was
not. If done at all, it was done by means of
some trick which Robert-Houdin or Herr
Wiljalba Frikell might explain.

A most interesting book lies at this moment

*Modern Magic, No 66, page 370.