Gregory about 1851, and like Dr. Carpenter, and a larger number on the continent, have examined and are examining these peculiarities. Their reports are often sufficiently astonishing to the lay mind. No doubt when, if ever, a very large and imposing body of these reports is presented by a cloud of scientific witnesses of esteemed reputation, then official science will give more time and study to the topic than it is at present inclined to bestow. Mr. Wallace has asserted that, 'whenever the scientific men of any age have denied, on a priori grounds, the facts of investigation, they have _always been wrong_'. {12} He adds that Galileo, Harvey, Jenner, Franklin, Young, and Arago, when he 'wanted even to discuss the subject of the electric telegraph,' were 'vehemently opposed by their scientific contemporaries,' 'laughed at as dreamers,' 'ridiculed,' and so on, like the early observers of palaeolithic axes, and similar prehistoric remains. This is true, of course, but, because some correct ideas were laughed at, it does not follow that whatever is laughed at is correct. The squarers of the circle, the discoverers of perpetual motion, the inquirers into the origin of language, have all been ridiculed, and ruled out of court, the two former classes, at least, justly enough. Now official science apparently regards all the long and universally rumoured abnormal occurrences as in the same category with Keely's Motor, and Perpetual Motion, not as in the same category with the undulatory theory of light, or the theory of the circulation of the blood. Clairvoyance, or ghosts, or suspensions of the law of gravitation, are things so widely contradictory of general experience and of ascertained laws, that they are pronounced to be impossible; like perpetual motion they are not admitted to a hearing.