It is table movements which are here spoken of, dictations by tipping or rapping; that is to say, by the third method heretofore referred to. This method has always appeared to be the most independent. In placing our fingers on a planchette, armed with a pencil, and in aiding its motions, we are brought into direct personal association with the results. We may be under the illusion that an outside spirit is guiding the hand, when we are unintentionally controlling it ourselves. We put questions relating to subjects which specially interest us. Passively we write things which we already know more or less about, and unconsciously inspire ourselves with the name of the personage invoked. Far more reliable are the answers given by a table. 4 Several persons place themselves around a table, their hands resting thereupon and await results. After a given time, if the required conditions for the production of the phenomena have been complied with, raps are heard, apparently within the table, and there are certain motions of the furniture. Sometimes the table tips on one or two legs, and slowly oscillates. Sometimes it rises entirely from the floor, and remains suspended, as if adhering to the palms lying upon it; and this lasts during ten, twenty, thirty seconds. Sometimes the table fastens itself to the floor with such tenacity that its weight seems to be doubled or tripled. At other times, and almost always when so requested by one of the sitters, a noise is heard like that of a saw, a hatchet, or a pencil at work. These are physical effects, which have been observed, and prove undeniably the existence of an unknown force. This force is physical. If one perceived only movements devoid of purpose, blind and irrelevant, or movements only in sympathy with the will of the assistant, one might rest in the conclusion that there is a new and unknown force, which, mayhap, is a transmutation of one's own nervous energy, derived from organic electricity, and this fact in itself would be important; but the blows are apparently struck inside the wooden substance of the table, and the movements are in response to questions put to invisible beings. In this way did the phenomena begin in 1848, in the United States, when the Misses Fox heard, in their chamber, the noise of raps within the walls and furniture. When their father, after several months of vexatious inquiry, at last bethought himself of old ghost stories, and appealed to the cause of these noises, the cause answered the questions asked, by means of certain raps agreed upon, and declared itself to be the soul of a former proprietor, killed in that very house. This soul asked for their prayers, and for the burial of its former body.