MESMERISM TO SPIRITUALISM 313 



friends, some of which I have not made public. Early in 

 1874 I was invited by John Morley, then editor of the Fort- 

 nightly Review, to write an article on " Spiritualism ' : for 

 that periodical. Much public interest had been excited by 

 the publication of the Report of the Committee of the 

 Dialectical Society, and especially by Mr. Crookes's experi- 

 ments with Mr. Home, and the refusal of the Royal Society 

 to see these experiments repeated. I therefore accepted the 

 task, and my article appeared in May and June under the title 

 " A Defence of Modern Spiritualism." At the end of the 

 same year I included this article, together with my former 

 small book, " The Scientific Aspects of the Supernatural," 

 and a paper I had read before the Dialectical Society in 1871 

 answering the arguments of Hume, Lecky, and other writers 

 against miracles, in a volume which has had a very consider- 

 able sale, and has led many persons to investigate the subject 

 and to become convinced of the reality of the phenomena. In 

 the preface I showed the inaccuracy of Anton Dohrn's sup- 

 position that religious prejudices had led me to believe in 

 spiritualism. A third edition of the book, in 1895, contained 

 two new chapters on the nature and purport of apparitions, 

 and also, in a new preface, a brief outline of the remarkable 

 progress of the subject; so that at the present day a large 

 number of its phenomena, at first denied, and afterwards 

 sneered at or ignored, have now become recognized and in- 

 cluded among the undoubted facts of physiological or psychi- 

 cal science. 



Among the friends with whom I investigated the subject 

 was Mr. Marshman, at that time Agent-General for New 

 Zealand, and Miss Buckley. Both were friends of Samuel 

 Butler, the author of those remarkable works, " Erewhon ' : 

 and " Life and Habit." Mr. Marshman invited him to a 

 seance at his house, with myself and several other friends ; 

 but he thought it all trickery. I sent him a copy of my book, 

 and he wrote me three letters in a week, chiefly to explain 

 that the whole subject bored him. In his first letter he says 

 that Mr. Marshman and Miss Buckley are two of the clearest- 

 headed people he knows, and therefore he cannot help be- 



