"Has the English public never heard of 'Magic photography?' Just a few years ago small sheets of white paper were offered for sale which on being covered with damp blotting paper developed an image as if by magic. The white sheets of paper seemed blanks. Really, however, they were photographs, not containing gold, which had been bleached by immersing them in a solution of mercuric chloride. The latter gives up part of its chlorine, and this chlorine bleaches the brown silver particles of which the photograph consists, by changing them to chloride of silver. The mercuric chloride becomes mercurous chloride. This body is white, and therefore invisible on white paper. Now, several substances will color this white mercurous chloride black. Ammonia and hypo-sulphite of soda will do this. In the magic photographs before mentioned the blotting paper contained hypo-sulphite of soda. Consequently when the alleged blank sheets of white note paper were placed between the sheets of blotting paper and slightly moistened, the hypo-sulphite of soda in the blotting paper acted chemically on the mercurous chloride in the white note paper, and the picture appeared. As this was known in 1840 to Herschel, Blavatsky's miracle is nothing but a commonplace conjuring experiment." 3. Madame Blavatsky's Confession. The individual to whom the world is most indebted for a critical analysis of Madame Blavatsky's character and her claims as a producer of occult phenomena is Vsevolod S. Solovyoff, a Russian journalist and _litterateur_ of considerable note. He has ruthlessly torn the veil from the Priestess of Isis in a remarkable book of revelations, entitled, "A Modern Priestess of Isis." In May, 1884, he was in Paris, engaged in studying occult literature, and was preparing to write a treatise on "the rare, but in my opinion, real manifestations of the imperfectly investigated spiritual powers of man." One day he read in the _Matin_ that Madame Blavatsky had arrived in Paris, and he determined to meet her. Thanks to a friend in St. Petersburg, he obtained a letter of introduction to the famous Theosophist, and called on her a few days later, at her residence in the Rue Notre Dame des Champs. His pen picture of the interview is graphic: "I found myself in a long, mean street on the left bank of the Seine, _de l'autre cote de l'eau_, as the Parisians say. The coachman stopped at the number I had told him. The house was unsightly enough to look at, and at the door there was not a single carriage. "'My dear sir, you have let her slip; she has left Paris,' I said to myself with vexation. "In answer to my inquiry the concierge showed me the way. I climbed a very, very dark staircase, rang, and a slovenly figure in an Oriental turban admitted me into a tiny dark lobby.