xxxvi] TWO INQUIRERS INTO SPIRITUALISM 321 



me than you could to Darwin ? And were your own rela- 

 tives impostors when you obtained answers to your mental 

 questions ? Do not those experiments prove a non-human 

 intelligence now as they did when you wrote to Darwin ? If 

 you cannot now explain these things, your change of opinion 

 has no logical justification. If you can explain them, I call 

 upon you to do so — if not to the scientific world, yet to 

 me, whom you have publicly accused of incompetence and 

 absurdity because I believe that phenomena of exactly the 

 same character as yours are realities and cannot be proved 

 to be impostures. As to your letters, copies of them were 

 handed to me to read by a person to whom (I was told) they 

 had been given without restrictions, and who was thus quite 

 justified in showing them to me. Of course I have treated 

 them, and shall treat them, as private letters ; but they 

 interested me so much that I made full notes immediately 

 after carefully reading them, so that I possess their substance 

 and many of their very expressions. After the way you have 

 referred in print to my belief in such phenomena most persons 

 would think I was quite justified in making known the fact 

 of the existence of these letters and their general tenor. I 

 hope, however, you will not render any such course necessary. 

 / think your proper course would be to publish the letters 

 together with the full details of your discovery of the im- 

 posture, a discovery so complete as to induce you to change 

 those convictions you so earnestly and solemnly expressed to 

 Darwin. 



" Hoping you will do so, 



" I remain, yours faithfully, 



"Alfred R. Wallace." 



The next letter I will give the substance of. He stated 

 that soon after having written to Darwin he detected Williams 

 cheating. He then had a cage made of perforated zinc, and 

 when Williams sat in it nothing happened. This fact, he says, 

 logically justified his change of opinion. It could not be a 

 supernatural power, or why should the interposition of a per- 

 forated zinc cage have suspended the power? There was 



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