"When my note appeared in the _Times_, that picturesque paper, the _Daily Telegraph_--whose peculiar gifts are _not_ what it claims, 'logic' and 'common sense'--took up arms. With a war-whoop _à la jingo_, and a flourish of the tomahawk, which on this occasion assumed the guise of that weapon so deadly in the hands of a certain Hebrew Hercules, he proceeded to demolish me (November 14, 1876). 'How,' he asks, 'can a man _perceive_ a cat in the room without the sensation of sight?' I am not bound to answer his 'how;' I affirm that man can do it, that he has done it, and that he still does it. Again, 'How can he _perceive_ a clap of thunder without the sense of hearing?' Let me ask, in return, how many there are--some perhaps in this room--whose nervous systems infallibly tell them, without the intervention of the 'Five Deluders,' that 'thunder is in the air'? After fixing upon me the term 'Suprahuman,' which I quoted from the late Lord Amberley's last book, he lectures me upon Eastern jugglery, as if I had never been out of Fleet Street. He asks, with that mock-humility so well known of old, in what the medium's 'legitimate agent' may consist? I, on my side, would inquire what he understands by sanative mesmerism or somnambulism--is it lawful or unlawful? He would shed a Saurian tear over my lapse from grace: 'It is melancholy to find a man of strong common sense indulging in such nonsense as this.' Finally, because I hold to 'nervous perception,' which may be called a sixth sense, after the fashion of one proposed by John Stuart Mill, he threatens me with _hysteria_, which again is not sound physiology, and (horrible to say!) with 'confirmed insanity.' "The 'Cairo magician,' whose ink-mirror in the boy's hand startled the public through Lane's 'Modern Egyptians '(chap. xii. vol. ii. p. 99, edit. 1846), is probably familiar to all in this room. Not so the account of the same phenomenon, given by Dr. Rossi (_Gazette Médicale de Paris_, February, 1860). This physician, established at Cairo, has supplied ample details concerning the methods employed by the Egyptian sorcerers to produce sleep accompanied by insensibility. "'In this land of tradition,' writes Dr. Rossi, 'in this country where what was done forty centuries ago is still done at the present day, there exists a class of persons who gain their living by the profession of _Mandieb_.' [The latter is a mistake for Darb el Mandal,[1] as the Arabs call the process.]