To the latter lecturer and professed pathologist is commended that sensible bit of advice to be found in the New Testament: “Physician, heal thyself.” Truly, no sane man would so sweepingly charge insanity upon four hundred and forty-six millions of people in various parts of the world, who believe in the intercourse of spirits with ourselves! Considering all this, it remains to us but to wonder at the preposterous presumption of these men, who claim to be regarded by right of learning as the high priests of science, to classify a phenomenon they know nothing about. Surely, several millions of their countrymen and women, if deluded, deserve at least as much attention as potato-bugs or grasshoppers! But, instead of that, what do we find? The Congress of the United States, at the demand of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, enacts statutes for organization of National Insect Commissions; chemists are busying themselves in boiling frogs and bugs; geologists amuse their leisure by osteological surveys of armor-plated _ganoids_, and discuss the odontology of the various species of _dinichtys_; and entomologists suffer their enthusiasm to carry them to the length of supping on grasshoppers boiled, fried, and in soup.[220] Meanwhile, millions of Americans are either losing themselves in the maze of “crazy delusions,” according to the opinion of some of these very learned encyclopædists, or perishing physically from “nervous disorders,” brought on or brought out by mediumistic diathesis. At one time, there was reason to hope that Russian scientists would have undertaken the task of giving the phenomena a careful and impartial study. A commission was appointed by the Imperial University of St. Petersburg, with Professor Mendeleyeff, the great physicist, at its head. The advertised programme provided for a series of forty seances to test mediums, and invitations were extended to all of this class who chose to come to the Russian capital and submit their powers to examination. As a rule they refused—doubtless from a prevision of the trap that had been laid for them. After _eight_ sittings, upon a shallow pretext, and just when the manifestations were becoming interesting, the commission prejudged the case, and published a decision adverse to the claims of mediumism. Instead of pursuing dignified, scientific methods, they set spies to peep through {118} key-holes. Professor Mendeleyeff declared in a public lecture that spiritualism, or any such belief in our souls’ immortality, was a mixture of _superstition_, _delusion_, and _fraud_; adding that every “manifestation” of such nature—including mind-reading, trance, and other psychological phenomena, we must suppose—could be, and _was_ produced by means of clever apparatus and machinery concealed under the clothing of mediums!