1877.J Notices, of Boohs, 41 1 
flowers or baked apples beforehand, these chemicals may be de- 
tected when the flowers or apples are examined. The wonder of 
such seances does not at all lie in where the flowers are brought 
from, but in the precautions used. The medium’s hands, for 
instance, are always held (as they were in this instance) yet when 
thus held the flowers drop on to the table, and even particular 
flowers and fruits drop close to the persons who ask for them. 
This is the real fadt to be explained when, as in this case, it 
happens in a private house ; and the alleged chemical test has 
no bearing on this. But here the test itself is open to the gravest 
suspicion. The person who says he applied it had struck a light 
in the middle of the seance and discovered nothing. He was 
then, in consequence of some offensive remarks, asked to leave 
the room or the seance could not go on ; and subsequently high 
words passed between him and the medium. He is therefore 
not an unbiassed witness, and to support a charge of this kind we 
require independent testimony that the chemical in question was 
not applied to the flowers after they appeared at the seance. 
This is the more necessary as we have now before us the state- 
ment in writing by another resident in the house, that some of 
the flowers were sent to a medical man in the town, and that no 
trace of ferrocyanide of potassium could be detected. The accu- 
racy of the supposed tests is also rendered very doubtful by 
another fadt. In a published account of the affair in the “ Bath 
and Cheltenham Gazette,” endorsed by Dr. Carpenter’s informant 
(in a letter now before me) as being by a friend of his and sub- 
stantially correcft, it is stated that the “ same authority ” who is 
said to have “demonstrated the presence of potassium ferro- 
cyanide ” on the flowers also examined some sand which fell on 
the table at the same sitting, and found it to contain salt, and 
therefore to be sea-sand, and to agree microscopically with the 
sand from a sea-beach near which the medium had been staying 
a few days before. This reads very like truth, and looks very 
suspicious, but it happens that another gentleman who was pre- 
sent at the seance in question took away with him some of the 
sand for the purpose of subjecting it to microscopic examination ; 
and from that gentleman — Mr. J. Traill Taylor, Editor of the 
“ British Journal of Photography ” and an occasional contributor 
to other scientific journals — I have received the following note 
on the subject : — I remember the seance to which you have 
alluded, and which was held on the evening of August 23, 1874, 
during the Belfast Meeting of the British Association, which I 
was attending. At that time, among other bye-pursuits, I was 
engaged in the microscopical examination of sand of various 
kinds, and I omitted no opportunity of procuring samples. During 
my visit to Ireland I obtained specimens from the sea-coast of 
Counties Down and Armagh, as well as from the shores of Lough 
Neagh. When the shower of sand fell upon the table during 
the seance I appropriated a quantity of it for subsequent examff 
