8 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. X. No. 230 



Another medium did about the same thing with his hands ap- 

 parently tied. That his hands were loose enough for all that was 

 done, Was glaringly evident. 



Thus far the commission as a whole. Their verdict is every- 

 where the same : " No new facts and many .old frauds." Individu- 

 ally the members have seen much, in fact, more than the mediums 

 intended. The experiences of Dr. Furness, the acting chairman, are 

 especially interesting, and recorded with a humor that does much to 

 relieve the monotony of this record of constant fraud and deceit. 

 Dr. Furness was repeatedly assured by several Spiritualists that 

 there was in him the making of a magnificent medium ; and so he 

 sacrificed himself for the cause, and ' sat for development.' Every 

 day for six months Dr. Furness sat with a slate for half or three- 

 quarters of an hour, and, in addition, constantly wore a bit of mag- 

 netized (!) blotting-paper on the top of his head, until he was al- 

 lowed, by the dispensation of the medium under whose direction he 

 was studying, to wear it around his neck. The paper had to be 

 changed every twelve hours, and the medium received a dollar for 

 each sheet. Although he was promised writing, or at least some 

 zigzag lines, in three weeks at the utmost, at the end of six months 

 ' not a zig nor a zag.' " Let spiritualistic reproaches of investigat- 

 ors, for lack of zeal and patience, be heaped up hereafter until 

 ' ossa becomes a wart.' I care not : my withers are unwrung." 



Dr. Furness next experimented with sealed letters. A question 

 carefully sealed was sent to the medium, and the answer to the un- 

 opened letter returned. Many mediums were written to. They 

 gave contradictory answers when asked the same question, and in 

 every case the letter had been opened, and mucilage and skill been 

 used to cover up the deception. 



Dr. Furness's description of the materializing seances can only be 

 appreciated when read in full. Everywhere he found fraud where 

 he looked for honesty. The fraud is so gross, so easily made to 

 leave its hiding-place and snatch the bait offered by an ingenious 

 question, that it becomes ridiculous. 



Professor FuUerton's account of the famous Zoellner investiga- 

 tions with Dr. Slade is a highly valuable contribution. He has per- 

 sonally examined Zoellner's confreres in the investigation, and finds 

 that Zoellner was of unsound mind at the time ; that Fechner was 

 partially blind, and relied on Zoellner ; that Scheibner was too my- 

 opic to see any thing, and was not quite satisfied with the seances ; 

 that Weber was old, and did not recognize the disabilities of his as- 

 sociates. On the evidence of these men, — deservedly honored in 

 their own specialties, as they are, — without knowledge of the arts 

 of a conjuror, has rested one of the most famous proofs of the truth 

 of Spiritualism and its connection with the fourth dimension of 

 space. 



A device by which Dr. Knerr detected a fraud is too ingenious to 

 be left unnoticed. He arranged a mirror about his person so that 

 it reflected the hands of the medium at work on a slate under the 

 table. He plainly saw the hand open the slate, read the question, 

 and noiselessly write the answer, which the fair medium had the 

 impudence to present to him the next minute as the work of de- 

 parted spirits. 



The mysteries and miracles that shape people's beliefs upon that 

 which is most sacred to the human heart, thus resolve themselves, 

 under the scrutiny of careful scientific observers, into a mass of 

 vulgar frauds and low deceptions. The mystic theories and spiritual 

 messages are ' disgusting cant ; ' the medium, a criminal. 



The psychological process by which believers are convinced is the 

 key to the secret of the success of Spiritualism : this is the problem 

 that lies closest to the securing of that mental health with which 

 such practices and beliefs are incompatible. If any one will recall 

 the feelings of utter bewilderment on leaving for the first time a 

 good performance of a professional trickster, and will imagine in ad- 

 dition that the things he holds dearest were at stake in the explana- 

 tion of what he saw, he will easily understand the excited state of 

 mind of a susceptible person on leaving a spiritualistic seance at 

 which he has seen but not understood. If your friend is a believer, 

 and urges your ignorance on to belief, you are apt to yield, and as- 

 sume that credulous state of mind which accepts all and examines 

 nothing. It is this state of mind that is to be prevented ; it is this 

 state of mind that is dangerous to mental sanity, that becomes mor- 

 bidly hungry for something unusual, something mystic, something 



occult. There can be no better check to the spread of this mental 

 temperament (except, of course, a sound training in scientific rea- 

 soning) than such a report as this, of sincere, able, scholarly men, 

 anxious to learn, and meeting only with practices for which the law 

 provides the jail. 



That these men have not yet exhausted the art of detecting 

 deception is shown by the fact that they are confessedly unable to 

 discover the methods by which a prestidigitateur performed slate- 

 writing tricks in their presence : this needed more training than 

 they as yet possess. But the magician confided his methods to one 

 of the commission, and showed that they were simply tricks. This 

 suggests the final point to be here noticed : this is, that the Spirit- 

 ualists will have a roundabout way of explaining these frauds. 

 They will say, " That does not prove that real manifestations do 

 not exist." This the commission admit, but it makes it improbable 

 in more ways than one. They claim that their explanations of how 

 the things are done are rational from their point of view. They 

 need the dark because darkness is negative ; if the spirit takes on 

 the peculiarities of the medium, that is a habit of the spirits ; if the 

 writing does not occur when the slate is looked at, it is because the 

 magnetism of the eye is unfavorable ; and so on, and so on. This 

 is perfectly true. There is no proposition so absurd, no fancy so 

 insane, as not to be capable of some kind of support, on the basis 

 of some kind of a theory. But the logic upon which civilization is 

 built is a marvellous network of mutually corroborating laws and 

 observations, multiplying the probabilities of the truth of its con- 

 ceptions in a geometrical ratio, and similarly dwindling into in- 

 significance the possibility of theories opposed to its fundamental 

 tenets. Of such a character are the explanations offered by the 

 Spiritualists. They are not impossible in an extremely exact, ulti- 

 mate sense. From a practical point of view, they are utterly 

 impossible. But, after all, it is not the logic that convinces. It is 

 because this system goes deeper, and appeals to the feelings, that 

 it blinds its adherents to sense and reasoning. 



The commission has done its work well, has set an excellent 

 example in recording what they saw accurately (for all turns here, 

 as in jugglers' tricks, upon the apparently most insignificant de- 

 tail), in subjecting mediums to ingenious tests, in treating them 

 courteously and sympathetically, as well as in exposing them plain- 

 ly and mercilessly. The present report, though only a preliminary 

 one, should do much to hasten that day, which Dr. Furness thinks 

 not far distant, " when the more elevated class of Spiritualists will 

 cast loose from all these physical manifestations, which, even if they 

 be proved genuine, are but little removed from materialism ; and 

 eventually materializing seances, held on recurrent days and at 

 fixed hours, will become unknown. Joseph Jastrow. 



NOTES AND NEWS. 



The New York Electrical Society has decided to give an 

 electrical exhibition in this city during the coming fall in the large 

 exhibition-building of the American Institute. The exhibition will 

 open Sept. 28, and continue to Dec. 3, 1887, and is intended to in- 

 clude all that relates to the science and application of electricity in 

 its broadest sense. No electrical exhibition has ever been held in 

 New York, and it is confidently believed that the one now to be 

 given will attract a large number of visitors, both residents and 

 from other cities. The American Institute has provided ample 

 means to carry out the designs of the society, which is also 

 assured of the co-operation of the American Institute of Electrical 

 Engineers. 



— The Political Science Quarterly for June is a splendid num- 

 ber, the articles covering important topics in economics, history, 

 and administrative science. Dr. Seligman's masterly article on the 

 interstate commerce law, an abstract of which was read before the 

 American Economic Association, is the leading article in the num- 

 ber. It is sufficient to say that the paper amply sustains Dr. 

 Seligman's reputation as a master of the railway question in all its 

 phases. Prof. Woodrow Wilson writes on the study of adminis- 

 tration ; and William M. Sims, chamberlain of New York City, 

 discusses municipal government, making generous use of his 

 knowledge of the details of the municipal machinery of the 

 metropolis. Professor Burgess's paper on the Culturconflict in 



