not such minor witnesses to .the profitable
gullibility of our generation meet us at every
street corner and in every advertising sheet of
the newspaper?—not to mention other things
even more surprising and even more believed in.
Indeed, I think that belief is generally strong in
proportion to its absurdity; and that the more
impossible, unprovable, and exaggerated a thing
is, the more ferocious are its adherents and the
more fanatical its martyrs.

And chief of all the strange hallucinations of
this scientific age of ours, is the fashionable
acceptance of the so-called "physical manifestations"
of spiritualism; and of all the surprising
conditions coincident and connected with that
state, the unconscious falsehood of believers is
the most incomprehensible. To hear them, no
one has ever seen to the back of one of the
juggleries practised; every stale trick, though
exposed again and again, is still unfathomed and
unfathomable; detection makes no more impression
on them than the way of a ship through the
water; the waves of credulity and gullibility
flow together again, and ramp and tumble as
before, so soon as ever the sharp keel of truth
has cut through them; and, like the blind who
stoned the long-sighted among them because
they told lies and said they saw what the others
could not, so do these spiritual adherents maul
and much abuse those of us who retain our
senses, and are not led away by a group of
knaves and a box of conjuring apparatus.

I will just count off one or two things that
have lately happened, showing the marvellous
credulity of this section of believers. A short
time since certain mysterious "spirit
photographs" were brought over here from America,
which the spiritualists assured you had baffled
the ingenuity of every scientific man in both
hemispheres to discover, and were hopeless
enigmas to the very cleverest photographers.
It did not raise any doubt in their minds that
the "spirits" were decidedly vulgar specimens
of etherealised humanity, and that they were
more often than not totally out of perspective
and drawing—as, for instance, those spirits
who had been accommodated with a chair, were
not sitting on the chair, but sometimes a foot or
so above it, and sometimes a foot or so below
it; and it did not in the least degree signify
to them, or weaken the force of their
assertions, that every photographer who knows his
business and has ever manipulated half-cleaned
plates, knew all about the process from the
beginning, and could reproduce as many "spirit
photographs" as you had a mind to pay for. I
watched this craze about the spirit photographs;
and I am constrained to say, that I heard as
much nonsense talked concerning them as
would have filled up more than one physician's
certificate for bed and board in Bethlehem
Hospital. Happily the craze has passed, so that
there is one lie the less to afflict and bewilder
poor wandering humanity. From the same place
too—America being the hotbed of these
"physical manifestations" as it has been the
grove where grew wooden nutmegs and the like
come "spirit drawings," done under the
table by spirit painters in the space of a few
seconds; and which the "first artists" (are said
to) pronounce inimitable and altogether
unearthly—though to the crass earthly eyes of
critical judgment, still closed to spiritual beauties,
they are merely coarse, odd-looking daubs
and nothing more—with vague suggestions of
invisible writing to be brought out by chemical
washes (as I saw the other day done as an
amusing trick) and sometimes a clever
substitution of cardboard; prestidigitation being by
no means an unattainable art, and substitution
not unknown even among thieves. Again,
nightly in this great Babylon of ours, is there a
crowded exhibition of spiritual tailoring and fine-
drawing, and a coat split asunder for the
purpose of being clapped on to the back of a rope-
tied medium (I acknowledge that "swish"
with which it is done is a very effective
adjunct), yet showing no trace of where this
"marvellous solution of continuity," as a clever
crackbrain of the sect calls it, has been effected.
And it is no trial of faith to the believers that
more than one professed conjuror, dealing only
with the confessed forces of nature as exhibited
in his own well-trained members, shows
precisely the same trick under exactly the same
conditions of time and darkness, without any
aid from the spirits at all. Tell them of this
"repeat" and they will answer you with
Aaron's rod and the magicians', or even with
more sacred parallels still; for our friends the
spiritualists do a vast amount of unconscious
blasphemy which we poor rationalists would be
horrified to even think of.

Following in the wake of another medium
are crowds of "luminous hands," like the disjecta
membra of his familiars, crawling about window-
blinds and the like, without exciting a suspicion
of gutta percha and phosphorus as items in
London shops purchasable by money. A friend
of my own, a spiritualist, has held these hands
in his: he affirms positively that he felt the
pulses beat and the warm flesh quiver in his
grasp; that they had the different characteristics
of the friends whose hands when in life they
were said to be; and one especially which he
had known for years, was presented to him.
with every feature of the past life restored. I
too have held one of these hands; and I affirm
just as positively that it was a mechanical trick of
some kind—a bladder filled with air, and manipulated
by a spring most probably—and that it had
no more life in it, and no more spirituality, than
the rustic's turnip or Pepper's ghost.

These are the marvels, then, which some
of the finest company in London have gone
night after night to see, spending much money,
and faith and emotion more precious than
money, during the process; and these are the
proofs, salient and undeniable, of the gross
credulity and want of critical faculty in our
age. A dozen detections—as of that miserable
impostor whose arm the spirits condescendingly
made their foolscap, and wrote thereon
words as false and foolish as the rest—cannot
open their eyes; the most obvious confederacy
they set aside as an insult to a plausible, well-