32 Human Levitation. | January, 
pretty safely say this very broad statement is unproved— 
that some animals might be found in whose weight, awake 
and asleep, or alive and dead, our most delicate balances 
would not detect a difference. Itis said to have been so with 
the fish, alive and dead, about which our “ merry monarch ” 
suggested to the founders of the Royal Society one of their 
first subjects of inquiry. But it was not pretended to be 
settled without experiment; nor does it now appear how 
the Archbishop and his authorities, the nurses, could be 
contradicted as yet by anything short of direct and special 
experiments, and those not very easy, nor likely to be made 
with much accuracy to-day or even to-morrow. The 
monarch’s joke (if such it were) was said to impress a 
lesson on the scientific men; and it really seems as if the 
archbishop’s bit of traditional physics might unwittingly 
teach one greatly needed by those of the present day, who 
repeat, ad nauseam, that in their studies experiment has 
superseded dogma, whatever may be the case in other 
subjects. Le Play names the following authors as pledged 
to this position, ‘‘ Les sciences physiques, disent les nou- 
veaux docteurs, n’assignent a l’homme aucune place ex- 
ceptionelle dans la nature; car il se confond par des 
transitions insensibles avec les autres animaux.* MM. 
Baumgartner, Biichner, Burmeister, Cotta, Czolbe, Feuer- 
bach, Giebel, Huschke, Lowenthal, Lotze, Moleschott, 
Muller, Orges, Rossmassler, Strauss, C. Vogt, R. Wagner, 
Zimmermann.” He invites any of them to correct him if 
they are misrepresented by this sentence from Biichner’s 
“‘Force et Matiére,’ 1865, p. 234. ‘‘ The best authorities 
in physiology are now sufficiently agreed that the soul of 
animals differs not from the human soul in quality, but 
only in quantity.” Now, without implying that Trench’s 
dictum above is anywise better founded, or that a physical 
difference between human and brute soul can or ever will 
be detected, we would humbly ask, supposing two physical 
propositions like the following were made—which are not 
so absurd as plenty that have had to be met, and very 
laboriously demolished—could any or all of those eighteen 
physicists, or all European science, lay hands to-morrow 
on disproof thereof? Supposed proposition :—‘‘(1). That 
between the weight of every adult man (or, say, male white) 
with and without his soul, z.e, alive and dead, there was a 
difference of a drachm and a quarter; but (2) that in the 
case of no brute animal (or, say, no woman or no negro) 
* L’Organisation du Travail, pp. 231-2. 
