Traimtion StiuUes 67 



round it. The Lord have mercy on ua &1I, if we have to believe in such rubbish. F. Oalton was 



there, nnd says it waa ii good stance. 



Sut'h iu< it wtw it lixl to a second Hniallor ami more carefully organiMd one with Huxley 

 present, who reported to Darwin." 



That report is printed in Huxley's Life and Letters, Vol. ll, pp. 144-9. 

 His conclusion was that the medium was "a cheat and an impostor." It 

 prmluced the followiii<f letter from Darwin : 



Down, Jnniutry 29 [1874J 

 Mv DKAR Hu.xi.KV. — Tt wa.s very gcHnl r)f you to writ<' .so long an account. Thougli the 

 itenco (lid tins you 80 much it was, I think, really worth tin- exertion, an the same nort of tliingx 



are done at all the seances, even at 's; and now to niy mind an enonnoUH weight of 



evidence would Ix? requisite to make one believe in anything beyond mere trickery....! am 

 pleased to think that I declared to all my family, the day l)eforo yesterday, that the more I 

 thought of all that I had heard happenetl at Queen Anne 8t, the more convince<l I was it waa 

 all imposture.... My theory was that [the medium] manag^l to get the two men on each aide of 

 him to hold e^ich other's hands instead of his, and that he was thus free to perform his antics. 

 I am very gliul that I is.<>ued my ukase to you to attend. 



Yours affectionately, Ciiarlks D.arwik. 



Probably Galton also saw Huxley's report and concurred in his judgment. 

 At any rate he very soon became a despiser of ' spiritualistic ' seances. 



Such are the last traces I can find of Galton's investigations into 

 spiritualism. Some thirty-Hve years later Galton knew that the present 

 writer had been invited to attend a seance by one who had sought aid from 

 spiritualism in what formed for different reasons a crisis in the lives of all 

 tnree. From his few written words on that occasion I know that Galton 

 must long and definitely have been convinced of the futility of any light 

 reaching human affairs from that strange medley of self-deception, chicanery 

 and credulity which passes under the name of spiritualism. But I have no 

 clue to the events or mental processes by which his attitude passed from the 

 stage of agnosticism to that of complete rejection. 



1 have already indicated elsewhere that Galton was young till liis death. 

 Even between forty and fifty he was a boy who must try his powers on all 

 things that came his way; it is true that he had had for some years experience 

 of editing the Royal Geographical Society's .7o"rn'</, but in 1865, amid all his 

 other projects and work, Galton took upon his shouldei-s a very considerable 

 share of the editorialdutiesof a weekly journal — The Header. Galton himself 

 says it was an aniu.sing experience, and indicates that the loss of the guaran- 

 teed .£100 was more than compensated by the gain of an unexpected view 

 of the seamy side of journalistic enterprise'. The attempt was a brave one, 

 and one of the committee of three, Spencer, Galton and Lockyer, which was 

 appointed to make the preliminary arrangements, very shortly after made a 

 marked success with a .somewhat similar journal — Nature. 



The Reader \\a.6.\>een establi-shed in January 1863 as a journal of Litera- 

 ture, Science and Art, and when purchased towards the end of 1864, the 

 programme of its future aims was propounded as follows : 



"The very inadequate manner in which the progress of Science and the labour and opinions 



' Afemories, pp. 167-8. 



9—i 



