58o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



for their " scientific " investigation. Having a strong prepossession, however, in 

 favor of the common-sense view that these performances were but the tricks 

 of not very clever jugglers, and learning that this inquiry was to take place in 

 a darkened room, and that the members of the committee must form a circle 

 with joined hands, I at once declined to have any thing to do with it; on the 

 ground that, to exclude the use of the eyes and hands, which the scientific in- 

 vestigator uses as his chief instruments of research, was to render the inquiry 

 utterly nugatory. Now that the tricks of the Davenport brothers have been 

 not merely imitated but surpassed by Messrs. Cooke and Maskelyne, I suppose 

 that no truly " rational" person would appeal to them as evidence of " spirit- 

 ual " agency. 



6. During the meeting of the British Association at Belfast in 1874, a lady- 

 medium of great repute held spiritualistic seances^ at which she distributed flow- 

 ers, affirmed to have been brought to her then and there by the spirits, fresh 

 from the garden, with the dew of heaven upon them. As there was nothing 

 more in this performance than is done every day by an ordinary conjurer, only 

 the confidence entertained in the good faith of the medium could justify a be- 

 lief in the " spiritual " transport of the flowers ; but this belief, aided by the 

 general " prepossession," had been implicitly accepted by many of the witnesses 

 on such occasions. An inquisitive young gentleman, however, who was staying 

 in the same house, and did not share in this confidence, found a basin-full of 

 these flowers (hollyhocks) in a garret, with a decanter of water beside it ; and 

 strongly suspecting that they had been stored there with a view to distribution 

 at the seance^ and that the dew would be supplied, when wanted, from the de- 

 canter, lie conveyed into the water a chemical substance (ferrocyanide of potas- 

 sium), in quantity so small as not to tinge it, and yet to be distinctly recognizable 

 by the proper test. On the subsequent application of this test (a per-salt of 

 iron) to the flowers distributed by the "medium," they were found to give Prus- 

 sian Hue. This is no piece of hearsay, but a statement which I have in the 

 hand of the gentleman himself, with permission to make it public. 



But every form of " prejDOSsession " has an involuntary and unsus- 

 pected action in modifying the memoi'ial traces of past events, even 

 when they were originally rightly ai:>prehended. A gradual change in 

 our own mode of viewing them will bring us to the conviction that we 

 always so viewed them ; as we recently saw in the erroneous account 

 which Earl Russell gave of his action as Foreign Secretary in the 

 negotiations which preceded the Crimean War. His subsequently- 

 acquired perception of what he should have done at a particular junc- 

 ture wrought him up to the honest belief that he really did it. To 

 few persons of experience in life has it not happened to find their dis- 

 tinct impressions of past events in striking discordance with some 

 contemporary narrative, as perhaps given in a letter of their own. 

 An able lawyer told me not long since that he had had occasion to 

 look into a deed which he had not opened for twenty years, but which 

 h'3 could have sworn to contain certain clauses ; and, to his utter aston- 

 ishment, the clauses were not to be found in it. His habitual concep 

 tion of the purpose of the deed had constructed what answered to the 

 actual memorial trace. 



