He spoke to a servant who left the room and returned in a few minutes with the memory man who stood in the center of the room and recited the entire poem. It appears that the King, wishing to mystify the poet, had the memory man hidden in a closet where he could hear the poem read. Inaudi, a Frenchman, has given performances both in America and Europe in which he looks at a blackboard covered with figures written by a committee, then turns around and immediately tells correctly every figure on the board and its position; adds, subtracts, and multiplies them, with lightning-like rapidity, and all without looking at the board a second time. He makes no claim to psychic or clairvoyant powers but simply explains his wonderful performance as being the result of a photographic memory. I might repeat such instances indefinitely but I think I have given enough to substantiate my claim of precedence for God’s natural laws and their marvellous, even incomprehensible working, over any so-called supernatural endowment of a class of people so thoroughly disqualified by all known laws of moral sociology, as many professional mediums are admitted to be by their most ardent supporters. Even such an eminent mystifier as Robert Houdin can misjudge when it comes to fathoming the so-called manifestations of the professional medium. As I have explained in “The Unmasking of Robert Houdin,” page 291, he makes two flagrant errors in attempting to explain the Davenport Brothers’ trick. First he claims that “by dint of special practice on the part of the mediums, the thumb is made to lie flat in the hand, when the whole assumes a cylindrical form of scarcely greater diameter than the _wrist_.” Secondly, he declares that the Davenport Brothers possessed the power of seeing in the dark as the result of practice or training. Releasing myself from fastenings of all sorts, from ropes to straightjackets, has been my profession for over thirty-five years, therefore I am in a position to positively contradict Houdin’s first statement. I have met thousands of persons who claimed that the rope trick as well as the handcuff trick was accomplished by folding the hand together or by making the wrist larger than the hand, but I have never met the man or woman who could make the hand smaller than the wrist. I have even gone so far as to have iron bands made to press my hands together, hoping to make them smaller than my wrists eventually, but it was no use. Even if the thumbs were cut away I believe it would be impossible to slip a rope that is properly bound around the wrist. Furthermore I know that Houdin was wrong in regard to the Davenports because of what Ira Erastus Davenport himself told me.