Dr. Donne was with the embassy in Paris, where he had been but a short time, when his friend Mr. Roberts, entering the _salon_, found him in a state of considerable agitation. As soon as he was sufficiently recovered to speak, he said that his wife had passed twice through the room with a dead child in her arms. An express was immediately despatched to England to inquire for the lady, and the intelligence returned was that, after much suffering, she had been delivered of a dead infant. The delivery had taken place at the time that her husband had seen her in Paris. Nobody has ever disputed Dr. Donne’s assertion that he saw his wife: but, as usual, the case is crammed into the theory of spectral illusions. They say Dr. Donne was naturally very anxious about his wife’s approaching confinement, of which he must have been aware, and that his excited imagination did all the rest. In the first place, I do not find it recorded that he was suffering any particular anxiety on the subject; and, even if he were, the coincidences in time and in the circumstance of the dead child remain unexplained. Neither are we led to believe that the doctor was unwell, or living the kind of life that is apt to breed thick-coming fancies. He was attached to the embassy in the gay city of Paris; he had just been taking luncheon with others of the _suite_, and had been left alone but a short time, when he was found in the state of amazement above described. If such extraordinary cases of spectral illusion as this, and many others I am recording, can suddenly arise in constitutions apparently healthy, it is certainly high time that the medical world reconsider the subject, and give us some more comprehensible theory of it; if they are not cases of spectral illusion, but are to be explained under that vague and abused term _imagination_, let us be told something more about imagination—a service which those who consider the word sufficient to account for these strange phenomena, must of course be qualified to perform. If, however, both these hypotheses—for they are but simple hypotheses, unsupported by any proof whatever, only, being delivered with an air of authority in a rationalistic age, they have been allowed to pass unquestioned—if, however, they are not found sufficient to satisfy a vast number of minds, which I know to be the case, I think the inquiry I am instituting can not be wholly useless or unacceptable, let it lead us where it may. The _truth_ is all I seek; and I think there is a very important truth to be deduced from the further investigation of this subject in its various relations—in short, a truth of paramount importance to all others; one which contains evidence of a fact in which we are more deeply concerned than in any other, and which, if well established, brings demonstration to confirm intuition and tradition. I am very well aware of all the difficulties in the way—difficulties internal and external,—many inherent to the subject itself, and others