Modern magic met with the same opposition in Europe. The French Academy, claiming, as usually, to be supreme authority in all matters of science, declined, nevertheless, to decide the question. Arago, who read the official report before the august body, closed with the words: "I do not believe a word of it!" but his colleagues remembered, perhaps, that their predecessors had once or twice before committed themselves grievously. Had not the same Academy pronounced against the use of quinine and vaccination, against lightning-rods and steam-engines? Had not Réaumur suppressed Peyssonel's "Essay on Corals," because he thought it was madness to maintain their animal nature; had not his learned brethren decreed, in 1802, that there were no meteors, although a short time later two thousand fell in one department alone; and had they not, more recently still, received the news of ether being useful as an anæsthetic with scorn and unanimous condemnation? Perhaps they recalled Dr. Hare's assertion that our own Society for the Advancement of Useful Knowledge had, in 1855, refused to hear a report on Spiritualism, preferring to discuss the important question: "Why do roosters always crow between midnight and one o'clock?" At all events they heard the report and remained silent. In the same manner Alexander von Humboldt refused to examine the question. This indifference did not, however, check the growth of Spiritualism in France, but its followers divided into two parties: spiritualists, under Rivail, who called himself Allan Cardec, and spiritists, under Piérard. The former died in 1869, after having seen his _Livre des Esprits_ reappear in fifteen editions; to seal his mission, he sent, immediately after his death, his spirit to inform his eager pupils, who crowded around the dead body of their leader, of his first impressions in the spirit world. If the style is the man (_le style c'est l'homme_), no one could doubt that it was his spirit who spoke.