mental soil unfit for its cultivation." I recognize with gratitude, as one of the many services Dr. Carpenter has done to science, his full admission of a series of facts in connection with mesmerism and animal magnetism, until the other day looked upon with suspicion by medical men and physiologists; and, further, I am ready to admit that the influence of unconscious cerebration upon some of the phenomena of spiritualism is probable enough. But I maintain that it is distinctly inadequate as an explanation. Its main use, as applied to spiritualism, has been that of a learned label to attract the attention of scientific men--a scientific rag wherewith spiritualism may cover its nakedness, but which all the ingenuity in the world cannot convert into clothes. II. Numbers of intelligent persons, men distinguished in science, in literature, in the learned professions, but whose "mental soil" has not been rendered wholly unfit for the cultivation of all germs foreign to the philosophy of the day, have acknowledged that the phenomena of spiritualism are not only veritable, but inexplicable by any known law. "The absolute and even derisive incredulity which dispenses with all examination of the evidence for preternatural occurrences,"[51] of which Mr. Lecky boasts as one of the results of civilization, has certainly lost ground of late. Professor De Morgan says: "I am perfectly convinced that I have both seen and heard, in a manner which should render unbelief impossible, things called spiritual which cannot be taken by a rational being to be capable of explanation by imposture, coincidence, or mistake. So far I feel the ground firm under me."[52] Mr. Edwin Arnold (_Rep._, p. 258) speaks to the same effect: "I regard many of the 'manifestations' as genuine, undeniable, and inexplicable by any known law or any collusion, arrangement, or deception of the senses." And so we come very much to what S. Bonaventure said in the XIIIth century: "Some have said that witchcraft is a nonentity in the world, and has no force, save merely in the estimation of men, who, in their want of faith, attribute many natural mishaps to witchcrafts; but this position is derogatory to law, to common opinion, and, what is of more importance, to experience, and so has no foothold."[53] Law has, indeed, long ceased to have anything to say on the subject, and popular sentiment, if not converted, has at least been reduced to shamefaced silence; but once again experience claims her rights, and, in a great wave extending across two hemispheres, the experience of spiritualism breaks upon us, and the opposite opinion is found to lack foothold. Even in this XIXth century, men are beginning to admit that magic or mysticism, call it what you will, though overrun as ever with trickery and delusion, is for all that no nonentity, but a long-ignored reality, worthy, not of derision, but of patient examination. True many of those who go furthest in their recognition of the genuineness of the