34 



TILE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



" A beautifully - formed small baud rose up 

 from an opening in a dining-table, and gave me a 

 flower ; it appeared and then disappeared three 

 times at intervals, affording me ample opportunity 

 of satisfying myself that it was as real in appear- 

 ance as my own. This occurred in the light in my 

 own room, while I was holding the medium's 

 hands and feet. I have more than once seen, first 

 an object move ; then a luminous cloud appear to 

 form about it ; and, lastly, the cloud condense into 

 shape and become a perfectly-formed hand. In 

 the light I have seen a luminous cloud hover over 

 a heliotrope on a side-table, break a sprig off, and 

 carry the sprig to a lady ; and on some occasions I 

 have seen a similar luminous cloud visibly con- 

 dense to the form of a hand, and carry small ob- 

 jects about.— A luminous hand came down from 

 the upper part of the room, and, after hovering 

 near me for a few seconds, took the pencil from 

 my hand, rapidly wrote on a sheet of paper, threw 

 the pencil down, and then rose up over our heads, 

 gradually fading into darkness." 



Whether, since the exposure of Katie King 

 in Boston (United States), the exhibition in the 

 same city of the methods by which numerous 

 "spiritualistic" tricks have been played, the 

 publication in this country of the affidavit of Mrs. 

 N. Culver, the near relative of the sisters Fox, as 

 to the mode in which these originators of " spir- 

 itualism " played on the credulity of the public, 

 and the imitation of many of the performances 

 of its professors by Messrs. Maskelyne and Cooke, 

 Mr. Crookes has begun to question whether he 

 may not have been rather hasty in committing 

 himself, I have no means of knowing ; but I do 



not think that any save those who have them- 

 selves yielded to the same " possession " will en- 

 tertain any doubt about the matter. Any one 

 who reads the account of the New England witch- 

 epidemic nearly two hundred years ago, will find 

 that able, intelligent, and honest judges and 

 juries, under the influence of a theological pre- 

 possession, allowed themselves to be " sadly de- 

 luded and deceived" (as they themselves after- 

 ward found out), to the extent of hanging some 

 scores of innocent people; so that the curious 

 " duality " of Mr. Crookes's mental constitution 

 has plenty of parallels in past time, to say noth- 

 ing of the present. 



The lesson which this curious contrast seems 

 to me most strongly to enforce is, that of the 

 importance of training and disciplining the whole 

 mind during the period of its development, of 

 cultivating scientific habits of thought (by which 

 I mean nothing more than strict reasoning based 

 on exact observation) in regard to every subject, 

 and of not allowing ourselves to become " pos- 

 sessed " by any ideas or class of ideas that the 

 common-sense of educated mankind pronounces 

 to be irrational. I would not for a moment up- 

 hold that test as an infallible one, But it ought 

 to be sufficiently regarded to make us question 

 the conclusions which depend solely upon our 

 own or others' subjectivity ; and to withhold us 

 from affirming the existence of new agencies in 

 Nature, until she has been questioned in every 

 conceivable way, and every other possibility has 

 been exhausted. — Nineteenth Century. 



ON STIMULANTS. 



Br J. BDBNEY YEO, M. D. 



MY object in this paper is not to confine my- 

 self to the consideration of the effects of 

 alcoholic drinks alone, but to regard the question 

 of the uses and properties of the various beverages 

 commonly consumed in this country from a gen- 

 eral point of view, and to inquire what has been 

 learned, from trustworthy physiological experi- 

 ment and from medical and general observation, 

 as to their influence on the human organism for 

 good or for evil. A beverage of some sort is a 

 physiological necessity. No one can exist with- 



out consuming a certain quantity of water, which 

 is the essential basis of all drinks. It has been 

 calculated that the body of a man weighing elev- 

 en stones contains sixty-six pounds of solid mat- 

 ters and eighty-eight pounds of water, and that 

 he loses in various ways about six pounds of wa- 

 ter in twenty-four hours, and this loss of water 

 must be supplied in his food and drink. In the 

 ordinary physiological processes nothing passes 

 into the blood, and nothing passes out of it, with- 

 out the intervention, in some way or other, of 



