160 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



circle, where his position was at the bottom of a long table, at the head of 

 which the "medium" sat, and on each side of her were some other persons. 

 All had paper and pencils in hand to minute down the responses, etc. Owing to 

 some " want of harmony" or other cause, the " spirits" failed hi correct replies, 

 and a good deal of confusion and repetition occurred. Often their reply 

 through, the alphabet was, "we don't know," "we can't tell," etc. Dr. 

 Bell was amusing himself, under these delays, in drawing with his pencil 

 a grotesque figure of an imaginary animal a sort of griffin with horns, tusks, 

 etc. After one of the replies of the " spirits" that they " did n't know," the 

 doctor rather pettishly lifted his pencil from the paper, and said, " "Well, do 

 you know what this is?" The response was at once rapped out, " It is hard 

 naming that beast I" As he was in a position where no eye could overlook 

 him, and where no person beside himself could know what was drawn, he was 

 at a loss to know out of whose brain, except his own, the quick repartee 

 could originate. He certainly had no consciousness of it. Dr. Bell also men- 

 tioned other cases where the idea in the questioner's mind was reproduced, 

 but in different phraseology from that he held. A " spirit," for example, was 

 asked where she had been buried. The answer was St. Augustine. The let- 

 ter S was first rapped : he waited at A, having no idea that the contraction 

 would be used, but it tvas, the rap being made at T. 



Dr. Nichols inquired whether Dr. Bell had any further experiences and ob- 

 servations in the curious inverted reverse handwriting, of which he had given 

 an account last year. 



Dr. Bell replied that he understood that that phenomenon of handwriting, 

 where the pencil began at the last part of the last letter of the last word of 

 the last sentence, and run back rapidly to the beginning, being also upside 

 down to the writer, was not uncommon, although he had not again met with 

 it. In one instance in his experience lately, the medium wrote in a reversed 

 manner, so that the writing could be read in a mirror, or by being held up to 

 the light, back to the reader an obviously very easy thing as compared with 

 that just described. 



Dr. Bell had seen many of the " spirit-drawings," which seemed like incon- 

 gruous grotesque specimens of Chinese art flowers, fruit, and leaves being 

 aggregated against all the precedents of nature or laws of botanical philosophy. 

 They were only remarkable from being the production of persons unskilled 

 in the use of the pencil, as was declared to be the case. Dr. Bell concluded 

 by remarking that he regarded the question, whether the spirits of the dead 

 had any thing to do with these phenomena, to be so much more important, in 

 a practical point of view, than any other minor facts connected with them, 

 that he had pretermitted much of his attention to these curious incidents, in 

 order to direct his investigations more to the other point, the result of which 

 he had endeavored to give. 



CONSTITUTION OF THE SUN SOLAR MAGNETISM. 



Mr. Thomson, one of the physicists who, with Carnot, Joule, Meyer, and 

 others have largely contributed toward establishing the relations between heat 



