360 
POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
by scientific methods and scientific research, he had the 
sympathies of the majority of scientific men with him, and it 
was hoped that soon we should have the fallacies of this last 
and grossest form of imposture exposed and annihilated. It was 
fondly imagined that, just as the spiritualistic humbug of the 
Davenport Brothers was shown to be but clever conjuring, so 
the audacity of the claims of spiritualism would receive a well- 
directed and crushing blow at the hands of Mr. Crookes. 
Great is, therefore, the disappointment of the scientific world to 
find, after all the blowing of trumpets which heralded these 
investigations, that now Mr. Crookes and his coadjutor, Dr. 
Huggins, have allowed themselves to be convinced by the 
results of two experiments only, performed one evening in the 
house of the former gentleman. And such experiments! We 
almost blush as we read them, to think that scientific accuracy 
is so degenerate now-a-days in England that any persons, much 
less men of science, could, by any stretching of a most vivid 
imagination, venture to call them scientific. For in truth they 
are the very opposite of scientific. Even to call them un- 
scientific is not strong enough ; clumsy and futile are much 
nearer the truth. Imagine men of science deliberately investi- 
gating the music-producing powers of an accordion in a wire 
cage 'placed under a dining-room table ! Imagine also when 
they confessedly had suspicion of Mr. Home’s honesty, and one 
of them watched him dressing to see that he concealed no 
apparatus about his person, that they placed the accordion in 
his hands before placing it in the cage under the table ! But 
properly to understand the futile character of these so much 
vaunted experiments it is only necessary to take the experi- 
ments in detail and criticise them. 
In the first place, then, there are only two experiments 
described — a number grossly insufficient to cause any reliance to 
be placed on their results. Errors of observation, errors in the 
mechanical arrangement of the apparatus are sure to arise, 
and it is only by repeating such experiments that these errors 
can be detected and allowed for. Who could have imagined 
any scientific men describing a “ new force ” on the results of 
but two crucial experiments, however many trial experiments, 
of which we are told nothing, may have preceded them ? 
And then the “crucial experiments” themselves — what are 
they? For the first experiment the following was the appa- 
ratus prepared : — “ A cage was formed of two wooden hoops, re- 
spectively one foot ten inches and two feet in diameter, connected 
together by twelve narrow laths, each one foot ten inches long, so 
as to form a drum-shaped frame, open at the top and bottom. 
Round this fifty yards of insulated copper wire were wound in 
twenty-four rounds, each being rather less than an inch from 
