702 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



England, Scotland, or Ireland without 

 finding, on inquiry, that within a radius 

 of ten miles there is some house or place 

 said to be haunted; some house that 

 either can not get, or can not keep, 

 tenants on account of ghosts," but to us 

 — we can not help it — the statement 

 simply seems a lamentably silly one for 

 a man of so much general intelligence 

 as the Rev. Mr. Haweis to have made. 



However, the great evidence is yet 

 to come : the ghosts are going to sit for 

 their photographs. Whether the pho- 

 tographer will have to be a medium or 

 not does not distinctly appear, but the 

 ghosts will, in a short time, distinctly 

 appear. Mr. Stead is working up this 

 part of the case with unbounded zeal 

 and faith, and the Rev. Mr. Haweis is 

 quite confident the ghosts are going to 

 come out all right. "Many photogra- 

 phers," we read, "are in the habit of 

 casting aside plates after partial develop- 

 ment, because they have what they call 

 a fault — that is, a blur or marks obscur- 

 ing or occupying portions of the plate. 

 Photographers will, in future, perhaps 

 be more wary. I heard the other day 

 of a young lady who was photographed 

 at Brighton, I believe, and twice the 

 plate came out blurred. The second 

 time she persuaded the photographer, 

 who was about to lay it aside as useless, 

 to develop it. The blurs, on being ex- 

 amined with a magnifier, proved to be 

 faces — all the same face. She at once 

 recognized it as the face of a rejected 

 lover who had died." Why this young 

 man took up the plate with so many 

 different specimens of his face, and how 

 he managed to prevent the rest of his 

 spectral body from being taken, and 

 why he stood so far away from the be- 

 loved one as to come out so small that 

 he had to be explored with a magnifier, 

 are questions on which, we fear, it 

 would be vain to expect any light. 

 Was he all " face " in his lifetime ? Did 

 the minuteness of his spirit image sig- 

 nify the smallness of the place he had 

 held in the young lady's affection ; or did 



the stand he took far in the background 

 signify the distance at which the young 

 lady had kept him ? It is said the young 

 lady recognized the likeness; but was 

 this young lady wholly veracious, or 

 was she indalging a fond fancy that the 

 swain was still hovering round her with 

 his face? We read sometimes of faces 

 in the fire ; and Hamlet, if we remember 

 rightly, succeeded in getting the wise 

 Polonius to see in a cloud the image, 

 first, of a camel, then of a weasel, and, 

 lastly, of a whale. As the old man 

 gazed, conviction grew, so that in the 

 end he was able to say with emphasis, 

 '■'•Very like a whale." Who knows but 

 that, as the young lady gazed, convic- 

 tion may have grown in like manner, 

 and the blur have passed through vari- 

 ous phases before it finally came out a 

 rejected lover? One asks where this 

 wonderful thing happened, and all Mr. 

 Haweis can tell us is that he " believes " 

 it was at Brighton. Perhaps so; but 

 until the place can be given with a little 

 more certainty, and until a good deal of 

 corroborative evidence is forthcoming, 

 we prefer to assign the chief share in 

 the whole business to the young lady's 

 imagination and the remainder to some- 

 body else's credulity. 



We are asked to believe in ghosts be- 

 cause in every age there have been ghost 

 stories. But would it not be more natu- 

 ral to suppose that in every age the hu- 

 man mind has been subject to aberra- 

 tions, and that some specific weakness or 

 irregularity of the mental constitution, 

 or of the physical organ, the brain, on 

 which all thinking, so far as we are 

 aware, depends, has probably given rise 

 to this particular class of hallucinations ? 

 We can not pretend as yet to know the 

 mind thoroughly in health and disease ; 

 but this we do know, that there are thou- 

 sands and millions of persons whose 

 lives are never intruded on by ghosts, 

 and who know absolutely nothing of 

 "occult" phenomena. According to 

 the reverend gentleman's own figures, 

 only one woman in twelve and one man 



