SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF HUMAN TESTIMONY. 333 



2. Claims as to general or special facts of science that are already 

 established by the investigations of experts. 



Here we rise in the scale of evidence, but do not require experts. 

 What is bad or useless evidence for original demonstration may be 

 satisfactory, or at least tolerable, for confirmation. The phonograph, 

 prior to its invention, was credible only on expert authority ; stories 

 relating to it may now be received on the statements of non-experts, 

 for, although they may be erroneous, they do not in any way affect sci- 

 ence. 



III. Claims as to facts or phenomena which have not yet been 

 established by experts in the special science to which they are to be re- 

 f erred, but which may yet be proved true by the experts of the future. 



Here we take a long step in the ascending scale of evidence ; we 

 come to claims that cannot be proved by any amount of non-expert 

 evidence ; which may be true, or may be untrue, as experts only shall 

 determine. A type of this class of claims is that of the sea-serpent, of 

 whose existence there is now no proof, but which zoologists might pos- 

 sibly introduce into science. Testimony which is sufficient to arouse 

 the attention of experts, and induce them to investigate claims that are 

 made by non-experts, may yet of itself have no value in science. 



Types of this class of claims are supposed new forces in Nature, the 

 existence of which can only be established by the highest experts in the 

 branches of science to which they respectively belong. The claims of 

 "odic" force and "psychic" force, and of "animal magnetism," are 

 excellent illustrations : although believed by thousands and thousands 

 of people of average intelligence, and by a number of eminent non- 

 experts in science, they are yet instinctively rejected, not because there 

 is any positive deduction against them, but for the reason that experts 

 have never been able to find a shadow of proof of their existence, but, 

 on the contrary, have been easily and abundantly able to show that all 

 the real phenomena supposed to indicate the presence of these unknown 

 forces can be explained by the laws of forces already known. An illus- 

 tration, belonging in part to a different branch of science, was that of 

 the alleged new force, between light and heat on the one hand, and 

 magnetism and electricity on the other, said to have been discovered 



and pathology of the nervous system do not, in their experiments, even suspect the ele- 

 ments of error involved. During the past year one of the very ablest of neurologists 

 Charcot, of Paris has published accounts of experiments in so-called " metalloseopy " 

 and " metallotherapy," in the making of which, according to his own statements, one 

 of the most important of the six elements of error (as indicated in a paper on " Mind- 

 reading," in a previous number of this Monthly), mind acting on body, seems to have been 

 ignored or ill understood, or at least not scientifically provided for. The experiments of 

 the committees of the French Academy with " animal magnetism," " mesmerism," and 

 " clairvoyance," of Crookes with Home, of Wallace and Zollner with Slade, are open to 

 the same and also numerous other criticisms. From such accounts of such experi- 

 ments, even an expert cannot tell what did or what did not happen ; it is therefore un- 

 scientific to discuss them. 



