have been levitated since St. Joseph, a medium named Eglinton was most subject to this infirmity.  In a work, named There is no Death, by Florence Marryat, the author assures us that she has frequently observed the phenomenon.  But Mr. Eglinton, after being ‘investigated’ by the Psychical Society, ‘retired,’ as Mr. Myers says, ’into private life’.  The tales told about him by spiritualists are of the kind usually imparted to a gallant, but proverbially confiding, arm of Her Majesty’s service.  As for Lord Orrery’s butler, and the others, there are the hypotheses that a cloud of honourable and sane witnesses lied; that they were uniformly hallucinated, or hypnotised, by a glamour as extraordinary as the actual miracle would be; or again, that conjuring of an unexampled character could be done, not only by Home, or Eglinton, in a room which may have been prepared, but by Home, by a Zulu, by St. Joseph of Cupertino, and by naked fakirs, in the open air.  Of all these theories that of glamour, of hypnotic illusion, is the most specious.  Thus, when Ibn Batuta, the old Arabian traveller, tells us that he saw the famous rope-trick performed in India—­men climbing a rope thrown into the air, and cutting each other up, while the bodies revive and reunite—­ he very candidly adds that his companion, standing by, saw nothing out of the way, and declared that nothing occurred. {107a} This clearly implies that Ibn Batuta was hypnotised, and that his companion was not.  But Dr. Carpenter’s attempt to prove that one witness saw nothing, while Lord Lindsay and Lord Adare saw Home float out of one window, and in by another, turns out to be erroneous.  The third witness, Captain Wynne, confirmed the statement of the other gentlemen.

We now approach the second class of marvels which regaled the circle at Ragley, namely, ’Alleged movements of objects without contact, occurring not in the presence of a paid medium,’ and with these we shall examine rappings and mysterious noises.  The topic began to attract modern attention when table-turning was fashionable.  But in common table-turning there was contact, and Faraday easily demonstrated that there was conscious or unconscious pushing and muscular exertion.  In 1871 Mr. Crookes made laboratory experiments with Home, using mechanical tests. {107b} He demonstrated, to his own satisfaction, that in the presence of Home, even when he was not in physical contact with the object, the object moved:  e pur si muove.  He published a reply to Dr. Carpenter’s criticism, and the common-sense of ordinary readers, at least, sees no flaw in Mr. Crookes’s method and none in his argument.  The experiments of the modern Psychical Society, with paid mediums, produced results, in Mr. Myers’s opinion, ‘not wholly unsatisfactory,’ but far from leading to an affirmative conclusion, if by ‘satisfactory’ Mr. Myers means ‘affirmative’. {108a} The investigations of Mrs. Sidgwick were made under the mediumship of Miss Kate Fox (Mrs. Jencken).