BAKON REICHENBACH'S THEORY OF 

 KISSING. 



THE writer of this has long since discovered by experience 

 that the surest way to perpetuate an imposition or a deceit 

 is to affect to consider it wholly beneath argument or refu- 

 tation. Regarded in the aggregate, there is a large amount 

 of rough popular justice in the world, and the popular voice 

 insists that pretensions shall be refuted, not dogmatically 

 condemned. With this principle of action I do not quarrel ; 

 though, in common with many others accustomed to elicit 

 truths by experimental research, I sometimes feel, and acutely, 

 the painfumess involved in that waste of time occasioned 

 by the performance of frequent demonstrations in a matter 

 already brought to an issue. 



It would be impossible, even did I so desire, to conceal 

 from my readers the fact that the present allusion to Baron 

 Keichenbach, and the so-called odic force, is in some way 

 suggested by the presence and the operations of so-called 

 supernatural or preternatural manifestors amongst us : and 

 if it be demanded of me, wherefore I return to this subject 

 again, when the public are getting tired of it ; when rivals 

 to the Davenport Brothers, performing in open light, accom- 

 plish most of the results these persons accomplish in dark-, 

 ness, and Redmond, whom I have seen, more adroitly ; when 

 a north-country editor has made plaint to a magistrate that 

 he has been defrauded by the Brothers Davenport, they hav- 

 ing received money under false pretences ; when members of 

 the first or initiatory audience of the Brothers Davenport, 



