23G 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



of a fellow-man of science, publishes without a 

 word of caution or hesitation a purely imaginary 

 account of it ? 



MR. CBOOKES'S " F AC-SIMILE " LETTER. 



"Nov. 8,1875. 

 " To E. Cooper, Esq. 



" c/o C. Maynard, Esq. 



" 223 Washington Street, 



"Boston, Mass., U.S. A. 

 " Dear Sir, 



" In reply to your favor of Oct. 25, which I 

 have received this morning, I beg to state that no 

 one has any authority from me to state that I have 

 any doubts of Mrs. Fay's mediumship. The pub- 

 lished accounts of the test seances which took place 

 at my house are the best evidence which I can give 

 of my belief in Mrs. Eay's powers. I should be 

 sorry to find that any such rumors as you mention 

 should injure Mrs. Fay, whom I have always found 

 most ready to submit to any conditions I thought 

 fit to propose. Believe me, very truly yours, 



" William Crookes." 



Notwithstanding this attack, all the evidence 

 Dr. Carpenter can adduce as to the alleged ex- 

 posure of Eva Fay has really no bearing whatever 

 on Mr. Crookes's position. Long and wordy let- 

 ters are given verbatim, which only amount to 

 this : that the writers saw a clever conjurer do 

 what they thought was an exact imitation of Eva 

 Fay's performances, and of those of mediums 

 generally. But a most essential point is omitted. 

 Neither of the three writers says he ever saw 

 Eva Fay's performance. Still less do they say 

 they ever saw her in private and tested her them- 

 selves; and without this their evidence is abso- 

 lutely worthless. Mr. Crookes has said nothing, 

 good or bad, about her public performances ; but 

 she came alone to his own house, and there, aided 

 by scientific friends, in his own laboratory, he 

 tested her by placing her in an electrical circuit 

 from which she could not possibly escape or 

 even attempt to escape without instant discovery. 

 Yet when in this position books were taken from 

 the bookcase twelve feet away and handed out to 

 the observers. The beautiful arrangements by 

 which these tests were carried out are detailed 

 by Mr. Crookes in the Spiritualist newspaper of 

 March 12, 1875, and should be read by every one 

 who wishes to understand the real difference be- 

 lt consequently becomes necessary for me to under- 

 mine that tower by showing that in their investigation 

 of this subject they have followed methods that are 

 thoroughly unscientific, and have been led, by their 

 'prepossession,' to accept with implicit faith a num- 

 ber of statements which ought to be rejected ae com- 

 pletely untrustworthy."— Fraser's Magazine, Novem- 

 ber, 1877, p. 543. 



tween the methods of procedure of Mr. Crookes 

 and Dr. Carpenter. Not one word is said, either 

 by Dr. Carpenter's correspondents or by the 

 Daily Graphic, as to this test having been ap- 

 plied to Mr. Bishop by an electrical engineer or 

 other expert, and till this is done how can Mr. 

 Crookes's position be in any way affected ? A 

 public performance in Boston, parodying that ol 

 Miss Fay, but without one particle of proof that 

 the conditions of the two performances were 

 really identical, 1 is to Dr. Carpenter's logical and 

 skeptical mind a satisfactory proof that one of 

 the first experimenters of the day was imposed on 

 in his own laboratory, when assisted by trained 

 experts, and when applying the most absolute 

 tests that science can supply." (Note C, p. 239.) 

 I have now shown to the readers of Fraser 

 (as I had previously shown in the Quarterly 

 Journal of Science) that whatever Dr. Carpenter 

 writes on this subject, whether opinion, argument, 

 quotation, or fact, is so distorted by prejudice as 

 to be untrustworthy. It is therefore unnecessary 

 here to reply in detail to the mass of innuendo 

 and assumption that everywhere pervades his ar- 

 ticle ; neither am I called upon to notice all the 

 alleged " exposures " which he delights in placing 

 before his readers. To " expose " malingerers 

 and cases of feigned illness does not disprove the 

 existence of disease ; and if, as I believe has been 



1 The account in the New York Daily Graphic almost 

 proves that they were not. For the clever woodcuts 

 6howingMr. Bishop during his performances indicate 

 an amount of stretching of the cord which certainly 

 could be at once detected on after-examination, es- 

 pecially if the knots had been sealed or bound with 

 court-plaster. Yet more : according to these illustra- 

 tions, it would be impossible for Mr. Bishop to imitate 

 Eva Fay in " tying a strip of cloth round her neck " 

 and " putting a ring into her ear," both of which are 

 specially mentioned as having been done by her. It 

 may well be supposed that the audience, delighted at 

 an " exposure," would not be quite so severely criti- 

 cal as they are to those who claim to possess abnormal 

 powers. 



8 As hardly any of my readers will have seen the 

 full account of these tests, and as the whole is too long 

 for insertion here, I give a pretty full abstract of all 

 the essential portions of it in an Appendix to this pa- 

 per. This is rendered necessary because Dr. Carpen- 

 ter declares that he is going to give, in the new edi- 

 tion of his Lectures, "the whole explanation" of the 

 " dodge " by whicli these " scientific tests " could be 

 evaded—" a dodge so simple that Mr. Crookes's highly- 

 trained scientific acumen could not detect it." These 

 are Dr. Carpenters own wor^s, in his article last 

 month (p. 553), and it is necessary that he should be 

 called on to make them good by really explaining Mr. 

 Crookes's actual experiments, and not some other ex- 

 periments which " American newspapers " may sub- 

 stitute for them. 



