MESMERISM TO SPIRITUALISM 309 



Professor Tyndall referring, I think, to the single test at one 

 seance as proposed by G. H. Lewes in the Pall Mall Gazette 

 shortly afterwards, and suggesting that Mr. Varley, who had 

 published some of his investigations, might be able to supply 

 such a test. To this letter I replied as follows : — 



" May 8, 1868. 



" Dear Mr. Tyndall, 



" I do not know Mr. Varley, but I will forward him 

 your note, and he can reply if he thinks proper. I rather 

 doubt if any single case would be conclusive to you. Hume's 

 argument is overwhelming against any single case, considered 

 alone, however well authenticated. He himself admits that 

 no facts could possibly be better authenticated than the 

 (so called) miracles which occurred at the tomb of the Abbe 

 Paris. But when you look at a series of such cases, amounting 

 to thousands in our own day, and a corresponding series ex- 

 tending back through all history, Hume's argument entirely 

 fails, because his major proposition — that such facts are con- 

 trary to the universal experience of mankind — ceases to be 

 true. 



" During the last two years I have witnessed a great 

 variety of phenomena, under such varied conditions that each 

 objection as it arose was answered by other phenomena. The 

 further I inquire, and the more I see, the more impossible 

 becomes the theory of imposture or delusion. I knozv that 

 the facts are real natural phenomena, just as certainly as I 

 know any other curious facts in nature. 



" Allow me to narrate one of the scores of equally remark- 

 able things I have witnessed, and this one, though it certainly 

 happened in the dark, is thereby only rendered more difficult 

 to explain as a trick. 



" The place was the drawing-room of a friend of mine, a 

 brother of one of our best artists. The witnesses were his 

 own and his brother's family, one or two of their friends, 

 myself, and Mr. John Smith, banker, of Malton, Yorkshire, 

 introduced by me. The medium was Miss Nichol. We sat 

 round a pillar-table in the middle of the room, exactly under 



