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NEW BOOKS. 257 liability to be carried away by various humanitarian enthusiasms; in the geographical conditions incident to a rapidly expanding population ". Modern Spiritualism proper began in Arcadia with the mysterious rappings of the Fox girls hi December, 1847. Within three years there were few towns of any importance without their rapping mediums. Within seven years the movement had acquired that complex character which it preserved throughout its later development. Spirit-rapping, slate-writing, apports of objects, levitation of the human body, materialisa- tions, all these were familiar to the earliest spiritualists, and all these were new. Not so the medium istic trance, nor the numerous cases of apparent thought-transference or clairvoyance. These had been mesmeric commonplaces for half a century on both continents. But the trance-utterances of A. J. Davis and T. L. Harris excel anything of the kind that had been known before. The illiterate Davis filling " 800 closely printed pages " with a whole system of the Philosophy of Nature (his trance-lectures were spread over a period of fifteen months. He was twenty-one when the book was published, and pro- tested that till then he had never read but one book and that an historical romance) ; the Kev. T. L. Harris dictating in the trance the 3,000 or 4,000 lines of his Epic of the Starry Heavens (fourteen consecutive days sufficed for the task) these are the classic instances of ' automatisme psychologique' in literature, beside which all the glossolalia of all the religious revivals fades into insignificance. Table-turning invaded Eng- land in 1853, but the ' classic period of English Spiritualism ' began with the invasion of mediums from America in 1860. In the following decade professional and private mediums (the ineffable Mrs. Guppy chief among the latter) were alternately deceiving the public and exposing one another. At one time or another, the Davenports, the Foxes, Slade, Eglinton, and a crowd of minor impostors, were all convicted of fraud. In many cases, professional conjurers have im- proved upon the performances of mediums who seem to have been little better than bungling amateurs. The average Spiritualist looked for a sign, and was only too glad of a counterfeit. It mattered nothing to him that the marvel was spurious. It was token for the gold of whose real existence he felt convinced. Nor is the Spiritualist's attitude a new or strange one in the history of religious conviction. Let any one reflect upon the orthodox Christian's view of miracles. Once the spiritualistic belief started somehow, it is easy to understand how it could feed on such poor stuff as fraudulent charlatans had to offer. Given a blind faith, plus a very dark room, and expectant attention may well lead a man to recognise the seraphic features of his beloved in an animated broomstick capped with a bit of muslin rag. Illusions, hallucinations, visions of a mind fevered with a rapt expectancy we can readily admit that the convinced spiritualist will fall an easy prey to them. But are they the sole caused of the belief in the occurrence of the phenomena associated with spiritualist mediums ? Mr. Podmore's answer is in the affirmative so far as the so-called physical phenomena are concerned. We agree perfectly with him when he separates these sharply from the so-called ' psychological phenomena ' and when he finds himself unable to admit that Mrs. Piper's trance-utterances can be adequately explained on the hypothesis of fraud, or of the normal acquirement of information. But we feel bound to examine critically his attempted explanation of the physical phenomena observed in the presence of D. D. Home. As is well known, the evidence for them (levitation, elongation, materialisa- tion, moving of objects without contact, handling of red-hot coals, etc.), is exceptionally strong. We have no space for anything like an adequate discussion. That would involve a review, not of shreds of 17