MY LIFE 



produced by any hind of mechanism. Hands arc sometimes 

 seen and felt, the hand often grasps another, and melts away 

 ; t were under the grasp, 



"The object of asking Lord Brougham and me seems to 

 have been to get our favourable opinion of the exhibition, but 

 though neither of us can explain what we saw, we do not 

 believe that it was the work of idle spirits." 



I have italicized certain passages in this early letter to 

 compare with the corresponding parts of the letters Sir 

 David wrote to the Morning Advertiser about half a year 

 later, and it will be seen that the discrepancies are very serious. 

 He told the public that he had satisfied himself that all could 

 have been done by human hands and feet; whereas in his ear- 

 lier private letter he terms them unaccountable, and says that 

 he could not conjecture how they were clone. Neither did he 

 tell the public of the tremulous motion up his arms, while he 

 denied that the bell rang at all, though he had before said 

 that it actually rang where nothing could have touched it. 



If this case stood alone it would not, perhaps, be worth men- 

 tioning, but a similar tendency has prevailed in all the scientific 

 opponents of spiritualism, one example of which I have given 

 in the case of Mr. Lewes's declaration that he had forced 

 Mrs. Hayden to avow herself an imposter, whereas what hap- 

 pened really proved that Mrs. Hayden herself did not con- 

 sciously give the answers to his questions. 



One of the eminent men with whom I became acquainted 

 through spiritualism was Mr. Cromwell F. Varley, the 

 electrician. Any one who will read his evidence, printed in 

 the Report of the Dialectical Society (1871), will see that he 

 was at first as sceptical as any other scientific man usually is, 

 and ought to be, but, having married a lady who was a 

 medium, phenomena of such marvellous nature were presented 

 to him in his own home, that he could not help becoming an 

 ardent believer. But he was always a critic and an experi- 

 menter, and he assisted Sir William Crookes in applying some 

 of the electrical tests to Mrs. Fay, as described by that gentle- 

 man in The Spiritualist newspaper of March 12, 1875. 



I became acquainted with him in 1868 through a letter from 



