THE REVELATION OF A. J. DAVIS 21 invesidgate the oase. The committee reported that it was a genuine oase of spiiilr control, and in 1849 the clei^ moved. Mary Jane was brought before a magistrate, and was sentenced to shcty days in prison; which efEectively persuaded the spirits to leave her. The dates sufficiently show that this was quite independent of the Hydesville phenomena, and the case of Andrew Jackson Davis is similarly earlier and independent. Davis, whose real trade was shoe-making, became in 1843 a mesmeric healer and clairvoyant. He was then a precocious, uncanny, long-haired youth of seventeen : the kind of person who was easily believed to be rich ia animal mag- netism. In 1844 he declared that Swedenborg and Galen had appeared to him in a trance, and warned him that he had a great mission to mankind. This is, of course, a genuine case of Spiritualism, since he professed to be a medium commimicating with the spirits of the dead ; but it is very doubtful if Davis could have initiated such a movement as the Fox family eventually did. The extraordinary efiusions he now poured out convinced many thati he was really spirit-controlled, and two admirers. Dr. Lyon and the Bev. W. Fish- bough, took him to New York to inaugurate the new revelation. The three of them lived for a year on Davis's mesmeric healing, and in the intervals he went into a trance and reeled o£E, in a most remarkable Cushion, a new philosophy of the universe. It was taken down as he spoke, and appeared under the
