size of my face with a shawl I had purposely hung up in the back of the cabinet." With such powerful magicians as an expectant interest and a strong prepossession, the realm of the marvelous is easily entered; but the evidence thus accumulated may be said to have about the same scientific value as the far more interesting entertainments of the "Thousand and One Nights." "Sergeant Cox," Mr. Podmore tells us, "adduced the hallucinatory feeling of a missing limb in proof of a spiritual body; and a writer in the 'Spiritualist,' 'not yet convinced of the spiritualistic theory,' could even pronounce the after-images produced by gazing at a straw hat to be 'independent of any known human agency.' From all of which it may be gathered that the conscientious spiritualist, when on marvels bent, did not display a frugal mind." Such opinions certainly justify Mr. Podmore's remark that there are spiritualists, "not a few, who would be capable of testifying, if their prepossessions happened to point that way, that they had seen the cow jump over the moon; and would refer for corroborative evidence to the archives of the nursery." It is natural to suppose that prepossession of such intensity could occur only amongst the less intelligent and less discerning portions of mankind; but to a considerable extent, and certainly in sporadic instances, this is not the case. The distinguished naturalist who shares with Darwin the honor of contributing to modern thought the conceptions of evolution, in his ardent advocacy of Spiritualism, has recorded his assent to the belief that professional conjurers, performing at the Crystal Palace in London, could not accomplish their tricks without supernatural aid. With peculiar obliviousness to the double-edgedness of his remark, he writes: "If you think it all juggling, point out where the difference lies between it and mediumistic phenomena." The same prepossession renders him so impervious to the actual status of the evidence for Spiritualism as to permit him to record so preposterous a statement as the following: The physical phenomena of Spiritualism "have all, or nearly all, been before the world for twenty years; the theories and explanations of reviewers and critics do not touch them, or in any way satisfy any sane man who has repeatedly witnessed them; they have been tested and examined by skeptics of every grade of incredulity, men in every way qualified to detect imposture or to discover natural causes,--trained physicists, medical men, lawyers, and men of business,--but in every case the investigators have either retired baffled, or become converts." And in the latest utterances of the same authority the failure to credit the marvels of Spiritualism is put down along with the equal neglect of phrenology, as among the signal failures of our "wonderful century." If any further instances be required of the astounding effects of bias and prepossession in matters spiritualistic, the vast literature of the subject may be