November 19, 1886.] 



scmNCE. 



463 



regards raps, one must remember that as early as 

 1851 it was shown that these could be and were 

 produced by voluntarily dislocating the knee-joint. 

 Holding the knees of one of the original Fox 

 sisters was sufficient to prevent the appearance of 

 the raps. It will be impossible to detail the many 

 devices to prevent fraud of which Mrs. Sidgwick 

 availed herself ; but the reading of these extends 

 one's appreciation of the conjuring art. Perhaps 

 the most ingenious device was that of placing the 

 medium in a hammock connected with a spring- 

 balance which recorded the weight of the ham- 

 mock and its contents. If the medium herself 

 personated the ' materializations,' her stepping out 

 of the hammock would be recorded. "The 

 seances were nearly unsuccessful until the last." 

 In the apparently successful ones an associate 

 was in the cabinet for a time, and broke her 

 promise by refusing to be searched when leaving 

 it. In short, remembering that nearly every 

 medium who pretends to any very remarkable 

 manifestation, has been exposed at some time of 

 his or her career ; that the conditions which they 

 prefer are those most available for trickery ; that 

 when the conditions are rigid and unexpected, 

 success is rare (if it ever occurs) : that the kind of 

 feats by which the spiritualists choose to prove 

 their theories are exactly the kind which a con- 

 jurer chooses, — in view of all this, the aversion 

 of scientific men to investigate such phenomena is 

 largely justified. The most (perhaps the only) 

 valuable result of this research is, as was said 

 above, the light it throws on the psychology of 

 belief, and, from a natural-history point of view, 

 the willingness of a certain class of humanity to 

 be deceived and to long and search for the phi- 

 losopher's stone. 



Mr. C. U. Massey contributes a paper on the 

 possibilities of mal-observation in the evidences of 

 spu'itualism, in which he maintains that these 

 possibilities have been greatly exaggerated, and 

 that, if we simply take the precaution of record- 

 ing one simple observation at a time, human tes- 

 timony is reliable enough. Mr. Massey (who is the 

 translator of Zollner's * Transcendental physics ' ) 

 then attempts to show, by recounting seances 

 with notorious mediums, that reliable evidence for 

 the existence of obscure forces exists in abundance. 

 The former president, Mr. Sidgwick, very properly 

 adds a note that the policy of a psychic research 

 society, far from encouraging this not over-moral 

 trade, should distinctly be averse to having more 

 to do with it than is necessary. 



Two papers by Mr. Frederic W. H. Myers de- 

 serve some notice. The first treats of "Human 

 personality in the light of hypnotic suggestion," 

 and is a very exaggerated estimate of the evidence 



which this condition can furnish with regard to 

 the nature of the eye. The main idea is, that the 

 subject almost always resists the notion that any- 

 thing but his own free choice determined the sug- 

 gested action, and will invent the most fanciful 

 explanations to make an absurd action appear 

 rational. In other words, one may even have the 

 feeling of acting as a free agent, and yet be con- 

 strained by a foreign agent, — a fact, by the way, 

 well known to Spinoza. The object of the second 

 paper is to suggest that telepathy may be opera- 

 tive hypnotism ; that a subject may be put into 

 this condition by the will of the operator himself 

 a quarter of a mile or more away. The evidence 

 produced is far from satisfactory, owing, in part, 

 to the fact that the observers who were sent to 

 find out whether the sleep followed would them- 

 selves unconsciously furnish the suggestion. Mr. 

 Myers then proposes a serial classification of the 

 methods of ' hypnogeny,' beginning with such 

 massive disturbances as cause cataplexy in animals, 

 and gradually leading up to this new ' telepathic ' 

 hypnotism. The scheme is in part suggestive, 

 but is premature, and adopts as proved, facts ex- 

 tremely uncertain and improbable. The theoreti- 

 cal portion of the paper is extremely dishearten- 

 ing ; such a sentence as '• that perhaps when I 

 attend to a thing, or will a thing, I am dnecting 

 upon my own nervous system actually that same 

 force which, when I direct it on another man's 

 nervous system, is the 'vital influence ' of mes- 

 merists, or the ' telepathic impact ' of which Mr. 

 Gurney and I have said so much," certainly smacks 

 of anything but a scientific spirit. 



Mr. Myers, Mr. Gurney, and Mr. Podmore will 

 very shortly give a detailed statement of their 

 psychical researches, in a two- volume book, 'Phan- 

 tasms of the living,' and to this work Mr. Myers 

 refers readers for further information. 



The present writer can not refrain from asking, 

 if all the brains, the labor, the money, and the 

 time devoted to these investigations by our English 

 cousins have yielded such meagre results, and have 

 led the way to so much useless and markedly 

 perverted thinking, whether, as long as the world 

 has so many important questions waiting for a 

 decision, so much good cogitative energy should 

 be allowed to go waste. 



RECENT WORKS ON TOPOGRAPHICAL 

 SURVEYING. 



The field work of the topographer consists of 

 two parts, which are entirely distinct in character. 

 These are, first, the work of location, which may 

 be done entirely by angulation, or by angulation 

 and distance measurements. It is geometrical 



