ME. CROOKES’ NEW PSYCHIC FORCE. 
359 
annihilate gravity, and can cause 44 sad and plaintive ” music 
at his bidding ? And the answer comes to us, one Mr. Daniel 
Douglas Home. As we how before him, in reverent submis- 
sion to a superior being, memories crowd upon us ; surely we 
have heard of him before. No man of true genius in this en- 
lightened country can keep his light long under a bushel, and 
a man of his transcendent power could not possibly do so. Is 
it not he whose mighty works made the readers of the 44 Corn- 
hill Magazine ” in 1860, tremble as they read ? is it not he who 
in that memorable essay, 44 Stranger than Fiction,” was the 
medium at whose bidding tables and chairs became imbued 
with a strange superabundance of animal spirits — when accor- 
dions played in distant corners, and then, for mere variety, 
floated in the air, and there played such marvellous melodies 
that they rang in the ears of those who heard them — was it 
not Mr. Home who floated about the darkened room, and 
made his mark upon the ceiling, and performed other marvels 
still more strange — surely, there cannot be two men in a life- 
time endowed with such miraculous and mystic powers ? Is 
it not the same Mr. Home, who since that time has been 
the pet of society, the great medium, the associate of crowned 
heads, and the persecuted victim of the law, who now at last 
has performed experiments which have caused two Fellows of 
the Eoyal Society to burst upon an astonished world with 
this terrible, this new, this revolutionary 44 Psychic Force” ? 
Such is the subtle power of this mighty and powerful man 
that at his bidding two gentlemen, men distinguished for their 
scientific attainments, both Fellows of the Eoyal Society, have 
surrendered their usually calm and sound judgments, and have 
themselves borne testimony that even practised men of science 
may be victims to that most false of all beliefs, that 44 seeing is- 
believing.” Surely one would have thought that men who are 
conversant, or should be conversant, with all the intricate 
details of many physical phenomena, of the trickery which can 
be so easily produced by electrical and optical arrangements — 
trickery so hard and so difficult for the unscientific mind to 
understand — that such men would be the last to make ship- 
wreck of their reputations on the result of such experiments as 
they have done. Surely they of all men should know or ought 
to know that in such experiments the eyes are the most 
deceptive organs possible, and yet these are the very men who 
come forward and in the pages of the last number of the 
44 Quarterly Journal of Science ” show that they have allowed 
their judgments to be deceived as well as their eyes. 
When Mr. Crookes, soon after he undertook the editorship 
of the 44 Quarterly Journal of Science,” published an article 
(now a year ago) announcing his intention of testing spiritualism 
B B 2 
