730 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



as these are sufiBcient to make a marvel of a clever piece of con- 

 juring ; add to this the increased temptations for mal-observation 

 afforded by the dim light and mysterious surroundings of the 

 medium, as well as by the sympathetic attitude of the sitters, and 

 the wide divergence between the miraculous narratives of spirit- 

 ualists and the homely deceptions which they are intended to 

 describe is no longer a mystery. 



The conclusion thus experimentally arrived at by Messrs. 

 Hodgson and Davey is corroborated by other investigators. After 

 witnessing a seance that was simply a series of the simplest and 

 most glaringly evident tricks, Mrs. Sidgwick was expected to 

 have had all her doubts entirely removed, and was assured that 

 what she had seen was better than the materializations at Paris. 

 " Experiences like this make one feel how misleading the accounts 

 of some completely honest witnesses may be ; for the materiali- 

 zations in Paris were those which the Comte de Bullet had with 

 Firman, where near relatives of the count were believed con- 

 stantly to appear, and which are among the most wonderful 

 recorded in spiritualistic literature. And, after all, it appears 

 that these marvelous seances were no better than this miserable 

 personation by Haxby." 



The Seybert commission finds that " with every possible desire 

 on the part of spiritualists to tell the truth, the whole truth, and 

 nothing but the truth, concerning marvelous phenomena, it is 

 extremely difficult to do so. Be it distinctly understood that we 

 do not for an instant impute willful perversion of the truth. All 

 that we mean is that, for two reasons, it is likely that the marvels 

 of spiritualism will be, by believers in them, incorrectly and 

 insufficiently reported. The first reason is to be found in the 

 mental condition of the observer; if he be excited or deeply 

 moved, his account can not but be affected, and essential details 

 will surely be distorted. For a second reason, note how hard it 

 is to give a truthful account of any common, every-day occur- 

 rence. The difficulty is increased a hundred-fold when what we 

 would tell partakes of the wonderful. Who can truthfully de- 

 scribe a juggler's trick ? Who would hesitate to affirm that a 

 watch, which never left the eye-sight for an instant, was broken 

 by the juggler on an anvil ; or that a handkerchief was burned 

 before our eyes ? We all know the juggler does not break the 

 watch, and does not burn the handkerchief. We watched most 

 closely the juggler's right hand, while the trick was done with 

 his left. The onex, minute circumstance has been omitted that 

 would have converted the trick into no-trick. It is likely to be 

 the same in the accounts of the most wonderful phenomena of 

 spiritualism." 



If we desire a concrete instance of this omission of an impor- 



