FALLACIES OF TESTIMONY. 253 



to her then and there by the spirits, fresh from the garden, with 

 the dew of heaven upon them. As there was nothing more in 

 this performance tlian is done every day by an ordinary conjuror, 

 only the confidence entertained in the good faith of the medium 

 could justify a belief in the " spiritual " transport of the flowers ; 

 but this belief, aided by the general " prepossession," had been 

 implicitly accepted by many of the witnesses on such occasions. 

 An inquisitive young gentleman, however, who was staying in 

 the same house, and did not share in this confidence, found a 

 basin-full of these flowers (hollyhocks) in a garret, with a decanter 

 of water beside it ; and strongly suspecting that they had been 

 stored there with a view to distribution at the seance, and that 

 the dew would be supplied, when wanted, from the decanter, he 

 conveyed into the water a chemical substance (ferrocyanide of 

 potassium), in quantity so small as not to tinge it, and yet to be 

 distinctly recognizable by the proper test. On the subsequent 

 application of this test (a per-salt of iron) to the flowers dis- 

 tributed by the " medium," they were found to give Prussian blue. 

 — This is no piece of hearsay, but a statement which I have in the 

 hand of the gentleman himself, with permission to make it public. 



But every form of " prepossession " has an involuntary and 

 unsuspected action in modifying the memorial traces of past 

 events, even when they were originally rightly apprehended. A 

 gradual change in our own mode of viewing them will bring us to 

 the conviction that we always so viewed them ; as we recently saw 

 in the erroneous account which Earl Russell gave of his action as 

 Foreign Secretary in the negotiations which preceded the Crimean 

 war. His subsequently acquired perception of what he should 

 have done at a particular juncture, wrought him up to the honest 

 belief that he really did it. To few persons of experience in life 

 has it not happened to find their distinct impressions of past 

 events in striking disaccordance with some contemporary nar- 

 rative, as perhaps given in a letter of their own. An able lawyer 

 told me not long since that he had had occasion to look into a deed 

 which he had not opened for twenty years, but which he could 

 have sworn to contain certain clauses ; and to his utter astonish- 

 ment, tlic clauses were not to be found in it. His habitual con- 



