SCIENCE AND SPIRITUALISM. 255 



highways, and, having found it, to proclaim it plainly and fearlessly, 

 without regard to authority, fashion, or prejudice. If, however, 

 such influential magazines as the Quarterly Review are to be converted 

 into the vehicles of artful and elaborate efforts to undermine the 

 scientific reputation of any man who thus does his scientific duty, 

 the time for plain speaking and vigorous protest has arrived. 



My readers will be glad to learn that this is the general feeling of 

 the leading scientific men of the metropolis ; whatever they may 

 think of the particular investigations of Mr. Crookes, they are unani- 

 mous in expressing their denunciations of this article. 



The attack upon Mr. Crookes is still more malignant than that of 

 Dr. Huggins. Speaking of Mr. Crookes 's fellowship of the Royal 

 Society, the reviewer says : " We speak advisedly when we say that 

 this distinction was conferred on him with Considerable hesitation;" and 

 further that " We are assured, on the highest authority, that he is 

 regarded among chemists as a specialist of specialists, being totally 

 destitute of any knowledge of chemical philosophy, and utterly untrustworthy 

 as to any inquiry which requires more than technical knowledge for its suc- 

 cessful conduct. ' ' 



The italics in these quotations are my own, placed there to mark 

 certain statements to which no milder term than that of falsehood is 

 applicable. The history of Mr. Crookes 's admission to the Royal 

 Society will shortly be published, when the impudence of the above 

 statement respecting it w r ill be unmasked ; and the other quotations 

 I have emphasized are sufficiently and abundantly refuted by Mr. 

 Crookes 's published works, and his long and able conduct of the 

 Chemical News, which is the only and the recognized British periodi- 

 cal representative of chemical science. 



If space permitted, I could go on quoting a long series of misstate- 

 ments of matters of fact from this singularly unveracious essay. The 

 writer seems conscious of its general character, for, in the midst of 

 one of his narratives, he breaks out into a foot-note, stating that 

 " this is not an invention of our own, but a fact communicated to us 

 by a highly intelligent witness, who was admitted to one of Mr. 

 Crookes 's seances. " I have taken the liberty to emphasize the proper 

 word in this very explanatory note. 



The full measure of the injustice of prominently thrusting forward 

 Dr. Huggins and Mr. Crookes as "recent converts" to Spiritualism 

 will be seen by comparing the reviewer's own definition of Spiritual- 

 ism with Mr. Crookes 's remarks above quoted. The reviewer says 

 that " The fundamental tenet of the Spiritualist is the old doctrine 

 of communication between the spirits of the departed and souls of 

 the living." 



This is the definition of the reviewer, and his logical conclusion is 

 that Mr. Crookes is a Spiritualist because he explicitly denies the 

 fundamental tenet of Spiritualism, and Dr. Huggins is a Spiritualist 

 because he says nothing whatever about it. 



If examining the phenomena upon which the Spiritualist builds 

 his " fundamental tenet," and explaining them in some other man- 

 ner, constitutes conversion to Spiritualism, then the reviewer is a far 

 more thorough-going convert than Mr. Crookes, who only attempts to 

 explain the mild phenomena 'of his own experiments, while the 

 reviewer goes in for everything, including even the apotheosis of 

 Mrs. Guppy and her translation through the ceiling, a story which is 



