might towards the floor." But as soon as Dr. Hammond had waved his hand over the table and declared that it might now be lifted, the young man lifted it with ease. Scientifically viewed, such phenomena are very interesting; they seem closely akin to the phenomena of hypnotism in men and animals, so strikingly illustrated in the experiments of Kircher and Czermak. Hens and pigeons can easily be put into a cataleptic state by holding a cork or a bit of chalk before their eyes so as to attract their attention; and in a similar way a frog's attention may be so absorbed that his belly may be cut open without his seeming to notice it. Mr. Braid has similarly hypnotised men; and Dr. Hammond produced complete anæsthesia in a lady by causing her to look for a few moments at a cork fastened upon her forehead while her back was cauterised with a redhot iron.

As for Mr. Home's tricks of putting live coals into his waistcoat pocket and on other people's bald heads with impunity, such things have so long been commonplaces with second-rate conjurors that it is astonishing to find intelligent men like Mr. Wallace quoting them as instances of ghostly agency. Nothing could be easier for a clever juggler like Mr. Home than to exchange real coals for false ones, or

to protect his own pockets and the heads of his dupes with asbestos cloth, without attracting notice. Such a proceeding would require far less skill than those of professional magicians, like Hermann or Houdin, in comparison with whose truly wonderful achievements the best performances of spiritualists are not for a moment worthy to be named.

Still keeping to Mr. Home, his famous trick of "levitation," or appearing to float through the air out of one third-story window into another, seems partly to illustrate the effects of intense expectation in producing hallucination, partly to show us for the thousandth time how little unsifted human testimony is worth; for on one occasion, while two "respectable witnesses were sure that they saw the great “medium" come sailing feet foremost through the window, their less gullible companion was equally positive that the levitating gentleman was sitting quietly in his arm-chair all the while! Nothing is more common than for us to be told what people of undoubted veracity have seen. For my own part, if I were to answer frankly in such cases, I should take my cue from a celebrated naturalist whose friend was recounting to him a miraculous shower of frogs from the sky. "It is fortunate," said he, "that you have seen it, for now I can believe it. If I had seen

it myself, I should not have believed it!" The commonest acts of perception are so liable to be warped by hypothesis (a fact which conjurors like Houdin consummately understand) that it is quite useless to conjecture what our witnesses may really have seen, unless we know much more than they are likely to tell us of the physical and mental conditions under which their seeing was done. At a meeting of spiritualists in Boston, Mr. Robert Dale Owen once saw what he took to be an "apparition in shining raiment," being quite clear in his mind that no deception or illusion was possible under the circumstances. But Dr. Hammond, making a diagram of the rooms from data contained in Mr. Owen's account, shows that, with the greatest ease, a "woman in white" might have been brought into the room and illuminated by means of a dark lantern without awakening suspicion. The case of Angélique Cottin, the famous "electric girl," is equally instructive. After tipping tables, repelling books, brushes, and other small objects, and disturbing magnetic needles before numerous "intelligent audiences," her alleged powers were carefully investigated by a committee of the Academy of Sciences, consisting of Arago, Becquerel, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and others. Tables, books, brushes, and magnetic needles, all kept most

provokingly quiet, and the "electric girl" subsided into oblivion, So, numbers of people who watched the "Welsh fasting-girl" were quite sure that she subsisted without food; but, when really competent watchers were introduced, the poor creature died of starvation, destroyed by her own obstinacy and the criminal acquiescence of her parents.

We have touched upon but few of the topics treated in Dr. Hammond's book. Into his elaborate discussion of the painful and often disgusting phenomena of hysteria, ecstasy, and stigmatisation, we have not space to follow him. His subject is one which leads the inquirer into some of the darkest and most loathsome corners of the human mind; but the inquiry has, nevertheless, its uses.

July 1876.

K

IX.

MR. BUCKLE'S FALLACIES.1

IT has always been a favourite illusion, that social changes do not, like physical changes, conform to fixed and ascertainable laws. Not only is it that philosophers of a certain class have, from the earliest times, explained historical events as instances of the continued interposition of an arbitrary power, exterior to and independent of the material universe; not only is it that thinkers of an opposite school have referred the actions of men to a no less arbitrary power, operative in each individual as an ultimate inexplicable agent; but it is that the mass of men

1 As this review of Mr. Buckle's History of Civilisation was written and published when I was only nineteen years old, I must not now be held responsible for all the opinions expressed in it. From the favourable estimate of Positivism which runs through it, I now of course thoroughly dissent. I have reproduced the article without altering a single word, and have appended to it a "Postscript," written fifteen years later, as an illustration of the change which Mr. Buckle's reputation has undergone.