argue that point, we ought to be satisfied that the vaccination we require and impose is the thing we intend; and the medical men are the persons who alone can settle this point. Let us hope that the spirit of Jenner, in some mind of to-day, will rise to the task, and enable the future historian to say that the smallpox was quelled in Great Britain in the eighteenth, and extirpated in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
SPIRIT RAPPING MADE EASY.—No. II.
THE CORNHILL NARRATIVE AND THE
PERFORMANCES OF MR. HOME. BY KATERFELTO.
In a former paper, published[1] under the above title, I promised to recur to the subject of Mediums, their professed intercourse with the spirit world, and the means they employ for the mystification of the credulous. If I wanted any inducement to return to the charge, it has been furnished by a letter of Mr. William Howitt, addressed to the “Morning Star,” on the 6th of October, and which contains a direct challenge to the present writer to proceed a little further with his pictorial explanations. As far as they have gone, they are not, it appears, especially gratifying to the taste of Mr. Howitt, and he asks for more in the language of bravado and irony.
“Let the writer,” he says, “go on and explain in the same way how Mr. Home floated about the top of the room, as mentioned in the ‘Cornhill Magazine,’ and as numbers of persons in London saw him do on another occasion.”
Now, I am about to answer Mr. Howitt’s challenge, and to explain how Mr. Home may have produced this effect and all the other wonders mentioned in the “Cornhill” narrative. I think the floating, and all the other business, manageable by means of some very simple contrivances, and I hope, with the aid of a few more diagrams, to make these contrivances as intelligible to my readers.
Now that I am challenged to account for particular marvels, I prefer, however, to consider them all and consecutively. It is quite true, as Mr. Howitt avers, that the “Cornhill” article has attracted a considerable degree of attention, and therefore I will give my explanation of its statements, one by one. There is none of them which throws me into that “paroxysm of terror” to which Mr. Howitt says they have roused certain journalists. On the contrary, I find them very easy to construe, and I will take them in succession, explaining each in its turn, that at least I may exhaust this present division of my subject.
It is ordinarily difficult to deal with the narratives of unwary spectators, because they slip over circumstances which I consider most material. Unless I can question the writers on a variety of data, which they ordinarily omit as unimportant in their eyes, I am left to vague surmises on a number of points, on which I could have positive certainty of if I observed for myself. I have less difficulty of this kind on the present occasion, because the writer does describe what he saw and heard, with more particularity as to many of the circumstances, than I could expect from one purely uninitiated. He is evidently a candid, truthful, witness, who would not, consciously, sanction imposture; and his exactitude, as far as it goes, is a proof of his sincerity. Such exactitude is, in fact, the greatest help I could possibly have in detecting the tricks which have been practised on his imagination, and it is all the more valuable because it is so uncommon even in those who really desire that the truth should be known. Of course those who do not are vague invariably and designedly.
At the commencement of his narrative, which any one who has not seen it may identify by its title, “Stranger than Fiction,” the writer contends that it must be taken for granted that he did see certain phenomena. It is conceded already that he did see what he states he saw, and it is quite as much a part of his testimony that he did not detect the means by which these same phenomena were produced. He saw what he terms facts, but they were only half facts—effects, I may term them, only to be ascribed to spiritual causes, because the actual means of producing them were not obvious to the particular witness. Let the feats of Robert-Houdin or Bosco be interpreted on similar principles, and we shall invest the performers with miraculous attributes. On the principle of the right man in the right place, we should make one of them Bishop of London and the other Archbishop of Canterbury.
The first marvellous phenomena observed by the writer were witnessed on an occasion when Mr. Home was not present. The time was morning; the only persons present were two ladies, with respect to both of whom he begs the entire question, when he states “there was nobody in the apartment capable of practising a deception, and no conceivable object to gain by it.” The writer sat at a distance from the tolerably heavy sofa-table at which the ladies were placed,—one at the other end farthest from him, and the other at the side. In fact, the position described is that which we have indicated in the following diagram, with the exception that the writer was at a greater distance from the table.
_-_Henry_Novra.png)
Fig. 1.
