_Reader._ You forget, doctor, that in 1837 spiritism was as yet most imperfectly known. It was only about ten years later that it developed throughout America and Europe. Let the medical faculty of Paris again offer a prize to any one who can read through a board; and no one doubts there would be no lack of competitors. When we see that physicians and others, owing to their own experience of spiritual manifestations, were compelled to repudiate their previous materialistic opinions; when we know that infidels by the same manifestations were brought to believe the immortality of the soul; when the learned and the ignorant, the rich and the poor, the layman and the churchman, the diplomatist, the philosopher, and the theologian, bear witness to the reality of the spiritual phenomena, and are ready to bring forward innumerable facts in support of their affirmation, we do not care what the faculty of medicine of Paris may have pronounced many years ago. You say that the faculty “submitted a number of such cases to a scientific examination,” and that “they were all proved to be deceptions”; but you would be very much embarrassed to say in what that “scientific examination” consisted. On the other hand, the proofs of the deception have never appeared; and the simple truth is that the spiritual phenomena were _à priori_ rejected, as clashing with the materialistic theory of the faculty. You pretend that “whenever the proper means were employed to prevent deception, clairvoyance was at an end” (p. 153). Such an assertion proves that you are completely ignorant of what is going on in the world, or that you are determined obstinately to ignore whatever could compel you to acknowledge the existence of spiritual substances. _Büchner._ “I have had the opportunity of examining a clairvoyant, of whom remarkable things were told, under circumstances when a deception on the part of the magnetizer was out of the question. The lady failed in all her indications; they were either absolutely false or so expressed that nothing could be made of them. She, moreover, made the most ridiculous excuses for her shortcomings. As she failed in her clairvoyance, she preferred to fall into a state of heavenly ecstasy, in which she discoursed with her _ange_ or tutelar genius, and recited religious verses. In reciting a poem of this kind she once stopped short, and recommenced the verse to assist her memory. She manifested, withal, in this ecstasy, no superior mental capacities; her language was common, and her manner awkward. I left with the conviction that the lady was an impostor who deceived her patron. Still, several gentlemen present were by no means convinced of the deception practised on them” (p. 154).