right to do as I please with the characters I create.” If a romancer desires to avail himself of this privilege he certainly has not the right to proclaim his novels as truthful historical writings, much less may others see in such a novel the “most accurate description of the events at Lourdes.” _Renan_ at one time said: “Oh, if we just once might have a miracle brought before professional scientists! But, alas! this will never happen!” He borrowed this saying from _Voltaire_, with the difference that the latter demanded God to perform a miracle before the Academy of Sciences, as if there were need for miracles in a physical or chemical laboratory. Those who desire in earnest to investigate miracles ought to go where they are performed. And even there, where the eyes can see them, it also takes good will to acknowledge them. In this respect an interview is instructive which _Zola_ once had with an editor. The latter asked: “If you were witness to a miracle, that would occur under strictest conditions suggested by yourself, would you acknowledge the miracle? Would you then accept the teachings of the faith?” After a few moments of serious thought, _Zola_ replied: “I do not know, but I do not believe I would” (_Bertrin_). On April 7, 1875, there came to the Belgian sanctuary, Oostacker, a Flemish labourer, by name _Peter de Rudder_, whose leg had eight years before been broken below the knee, and who was then suffering from two suppurating cancerous sores, that had formed at the place of the fracture and on the foot. He suddenly was entirely cured. The case was investigated in a most exact way. In 1900 a treatise concerning the case was published by three physicians. _E. Wasmann_ had as early as 1900 published a short extract of it in the “Stimmen aus Maria Laach.” In February, 1907, when, at Berlin, he delivered his lectures which were followed by a discussion, his opponents, headed by Prof. _Plate_, did not know of this article. When they learned of it, some time afterwards, he was put under the ban because he “had degraded himself to the position of a charlatan by vouching with his scientific repute for the happening of a miraculous cure”; and they said “they would fight him in the same way as they would fight every quack, but as a scientist he was discarded.” _Plate_ had on the evening of the discussion asked of the assembled scientists the question: “Have we ever observed anything like a suspension of the natural laws? The reply to it is an unconditional ‘we have not’; consequently Theism becomes inadmissible to the natural scientist.” Here, in the _de Rudder_ case, is found the required instance. But _Plate_ knows, in advance of any investigation, that it is a fairy tale, believed without critical examination. And Prof. _Hansemann_, another